Reactions to the Shinran declaration of intent, and Byzantium’s subsequent assumption of the war path, rippled through the vast abdomen of MEH society like a tidal wave in a reflecting pool. The last months of the year 3400 had been most happy, with the enhappening of so many subject worlds in the sectors now occupied by the MEH, and even despite the cold treatment of the surrounding nations there were still many private parties willing to provide subjects for the Goddess’ greatest experiments. They had celebrated the end of a good year in a truly decadent smorgasbord of gluttony, the biggest happy meal in this side of the multiverse, savoring all this new reality’s finest delicacies. In their old universe, they had happily gorged themselves for centuries in a never ending eat-all-you-can buffet, and everyone was happy to find out that they could continue on feasting on this galaxy’s delectable morsels.

But their luck had changed in the first months of the year 3401. First in a very unhappy string of events was the massive Ork WAAAAAGH! The MEH had found itself uncomfortably close to the greenskins and initially planned to exterminate them to the last beast, but the Orks in this universe were smaller and weaker than those of their home realm, as anorexic and bony as the rest of this reality’s inhabitants. With the coming of the feast, the Goddess had decided that procrastination was the happiest choice, and so the tiring task of extermination had been put aside for tomorrow.

Then the Orks came and rampaged through Wolf 359. It was the unhappiest time in MEH history. The scrawny greenskins had punched the MEH in the gut, splintering its pancreas, and when the Orks were finally repulsed all that was left of Wolf was a skinned pelt of its former glory. The mountainous ice cream factories had been looted and their stores of 31,000 flavors melted, the great barrier reefs of solid candy shattered and crawling with squig-ants, and the glaciers of solidified powder that melted into freshwater rivers to form entire oceans of juice had been mixed with Ork spores before the boyz drank it dry and left only horrible-smelling backwash.

It was a calamity of morbidly obese proportions. Wolf 359’s worlds had been named after the staple foods of the MEH people. Wolverines, coyotes, hippopotamuses, elephants, sloths. All these animals were bio-engineered to grow from mutated trees in Wolf 359’s forests. These delicious sins against nature had been looted by the Orks, uprooted, painted red and stolen.

The people of the MEH were now facing horrible food shortages. It was not quite a famine, for the other worlds in the other systems produced their own produces, but the staple foods made in Wolf were vital. Grounded sloth was a seasoning on all foods. Pureed coyotes mixed with hippo chunks was a drink more popular than water. Elephants were always a part of all meals, and wolverine powder was like a chili spice. The people were on the verge of sending their robots to riot because they were too lazy to do it themselves.

And now those Shinrans, who were geostigma-diseased skinny anorexic androgynes as opposed to healthily obese fatsos whose sexes could barely be determined, had gathered a coalition of willing nations to defy the Goddess and her great experiments. Those fools did not know how important her work was to the very existence of the Multiversal Empire of Happiness. They would come, in two months time.

The Orks might be able to take away their food, but the Shinrans would never take away their happiness!

Military preparations were underway. Despite the WAAAAGH! they still had the combined might of an entire star nation at their disposal. The Goddess in her infinite wisdom had not spread their Empire across so many worlds and sectors, but instead concentrated it into single systems where all their great fleets and defenses were gathered to create the best defended bastions this scrawny galaxy - with its skin-and-bones spaceships - had ever seen. Just let them try to pry the happiness out of the MEH’s fat sausage-shaped fingers. Let them try.

But the battle would be hard, and the sweat of their brow would truly dribble down onto their eight chins. This would be the war to end all wars. The damage done to Wolf was not yet undone. If they were to be besieged, they would need supplies to last. War would take exertion and their victory would not be easy. They would grow tired. They would grow hungry. They would need food.

Their primary source at Wolf was gone. They had to find another food source, and so they did. The space the MEH systems had emerged in was ripe and bountiful with habitable worlds. Roughly five per sector, filled with life. Nature in all its majesty had persevered, creating so much life. Beautiful life. Vibrant life. Glourious life!

Edible life.

As war preparations went on, the MEH dispatched fleets of foodbots to these worlds to do their groceries.

[To Be Continued...]

shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZookShroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medicPink Sugar Heart Attack!

"I want to know how many ships you've raided in the last year. I want to know your port of call. And I want to know what you do with the psions you kidnap. Who do you sell them to?"

Ciff El Hakkouni briefly weighed his options, then decided to go for broke. He told them what they wanted to know. They asked several more questions, mostly asking for specifics. After each question the fuzzy feeling in his head intensified, and it felt as if someone had replaced his brain with a bag of wool. Finally the woman gave the bearest of nods. "He's telling the truth."

The black man nodded and stood up from the chair. "Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. El Hakkouni."

"Yeah, whatever man. Now cut me loose. We had a deal."

"We did indeed." The man nodded and drew a pistol from a compartment in his armor. Ciff El Hakkouni had just enough time to twist his features into an expression of horror and outrage before the laser punched a hole through his forehead, flash-vaporizing blood and brains that exploded out in a gory rupture through ears and eyes before caking the steel wall and floor of the cargo bay. The lifeless body of the second engineer went limp against the ropes that held him in the chair.

New SomaliaWild Space

With a scream of superheated air the hyperlight shuttle arched toward the cosmodrome of New Somalia's capital city. Muqdisho was a shithole. In fact, all of New Somalia was a shithole. Locked in a particularly nasty patch of shoals it was too far away for either the Solarians, Sassannids or Bragulans to really exert any kind of lasting influence on even if they wanted to which, on the whole, they did not. The planet was old in geologic terms and orbited close to its red giant star, making it too hot for Bragulans, and some ancient and long-gone civilization had extracted most of the planet's easily accessible resources millennia before humans even contemplated spaceflight -- meaning it was utterly uninteresting to Sassannid noble houses and Solarian megacorps both.

What it was, however, was conveniently out of the way, and suspiciously close to a seldom used hyperlane that headed straight for the heart of Pfhor territory. These two qualities made it the ideal hide-out for pirates and other assorted scum. It was renowned for this, actually: it had been a pirate haven for decades at the least. Every once in a blue moon, whenever some raider had been too bold, the USMC, the Saurdukar or the Imperial Legion would fly over, conduct the token raid or make a kinetic statement from orbit and the pirates would scatter for a while... But the politics of the Great Powers and the remoteness of New Somalia meant it never lasted, and after a while business would resume as usual, barring perhaps a few extra craters in the surface of the world.

It wasn't pretty, or desirable, or just, but that's just how it was in Wild Space. It was a dog eat dog galaxy out here, and if you didn't like it... Well, tough. Live still went on, even if it was cheaper than bullets. And it was here that the now dead-and-spaced Ciff El Hakkouni had pointed the Wild Geese.

There was one big advantage to infiltrating a prototypical hive of scum and villainy: these places weren't big on passport checks. The Muqdisho spaceport was no exception. After paying the parking fee, which was more a bribe than anything else, the local enforcers, brutish thugs in the service of someone who called himself a Padshah, Jabba or Jaffa or something, barely paid the two mercenaries another glance. They were hardly the first mercs to arrive on New Somalia, and they most definitely wouldn't be the last either.

But that didn't mean the Wild Geese weren't themselves keeping their eyes open.

Sirocco was the first to spot the strangely shaped craft sitting on the tarmac in front of a dilapidated hangar, not far from where their own hypershuttle was parked. She elbowed her partner. The giant black man craned his head and whistled. "Is that what I think it is?"

Sirocco looked at him darkly. "If you think it's a Volkslander Kriegdiskette then you'd be right."

Anthemum Dubal nodded slowly. "Volkslanders, this far out? That can't be a coincidence."

"Fuckin' genetic supremacists show up in the shoals when we're investigating slavers and anti-psion sentiments? Damn straight it isn't."

Taki had not expected that they would be the first to be recalled, evacuated, or evicted. The Atlanteans hadn't seemed like terrible types (aside from their grammar and spelling, which had driven two Aggregates and a Mechanical into partial nervous breakdowns – one of the Aggregates didn't even learn English as a protective measure and she still ended up bouncing off the walls.) But now, here they were, quietly packing up everything to leave, trying not to make a scene before their getaway.

On the bright side, at least now she wouldn't have to wear this ridiculous getup made almost entirely of not-at-all hidden biofilm cameras and sensors.

Cameras!

“Watch that! Be careful! That is fragile! Delicate! Yes! Carry it as if you care!” That was the voice of Geekstress, the spiky-feathered technical punkette. A crate carried by a Mechanical (or maybe an Aggregate carrier unit) appeared around the corner, followed closely by her. Whatever was in the crate she probably only knew, as she has scrawled “NOT FOR YOU!” on the outside in dark industrial grease.

“That's right! Get that to the yacht! If it's damaged, I know who did it! Taki! Have you seen Ferocity anywhere?” She scrambled over with her clumsy gait and immediately started going over Taki's sensor suite.

“Recently? I have not,” Taki said.

“He ran off to get some last sparring in with Bruce,” Geekstress said. “Looks good here. Could you come with me? There's been some funny hums and my stuff's all packed up.”

Balconies protruded from the arcology, staggered to give each compartment a little section of light and air. The Refuge's balcony was decorated with savanna flora of the world of Nova Australia, which quite suited the old bushie Bruce Robbo. The Refugees were fine with it as well, since it was nicely done.

Author's note: Don't try this at home. Or ever.

“RRRAAAWRRRhisssssss!” Ferocity screamed as he threw himself against Bruce's shield.

Bruce stood his ground against the onslaught and observed, “Mad as a cut snake. You've gone sloppy, m' reffo. Come a gutser like that.”

Ferocity growled something in acknowledgment and scratched the dirt with his talons, just a bit too self-consciously.

“Have troubles, Freo? You're not yourself.”

Ferocity waggled his neck-thingies. He was never good at talking about his feelings anyway, and he probably shouldn't say this, but, “Bruce, I haven't known you all that long, but you're an honorable chap, and I think I trust you more than anyone else outside the Refuge. So...this will likely be our last match.”

“Strewth, no! Why's that?”

“We're leaving. Evac orders, called home. There was a... a heaper of an incident.”

Bruce pondered on that a moment, then nodded in acceptance. “Yeah, that'd be right. No worries, mate.” After all, what could you do when orders came?

“So I wanted to have a last blue with you before we left.”

“That's ace! Thinking of your blokes. So,” and Bruce held his shield back up, “you always jump too high up, leave yourself too undefended-” The two of them went back to their sparring.

“There! No, there! Over there! Not that there, the other there!” Geekstress resorted to pushing Her Excellency to get her positioned just right for the scan. Normally this would be a massive breach of protocol, but it was Geekstress, so what could they do? “Yes, hold still! Now, zoom in! And some more! More! Yes! Transmit to the viewer!”

“What is that?” Taki asked. Geekstress didn't answer because she was too busy figuring it out.

Ferocity suddenly stopped. “What's that?”

“Eh?”

“That sound. The buzzing sound.” They both stopped to listen.

“Sounds like a beehive,” said Bruce.

“What's a beehive?” Ferocity asked.

“They're coming this way!” Geekstress said. She triggered the alarms. “All personnel – in fact, anyone who is outside – get inside immediately! Close all exits and windows! This is not just for the Refuge constituents – this is for everyone!” She was rapidly entering the codes (which she wasn't supposed to have, but again, Geekstress) to warn everyone in the arcology.

“What is going on?” Taki asked.

“BEES!” Geekstress said. “They're flying up the building!”

“I suppose we should go in,” said Ferocity, as Geekstress's warning boomed. “Too bad. I wanted a few more pointers.”

“No worries,” said Bruce. They both slowly headed towards the balcony's exit.

And then a cloud of bees rose up to their level.

Bruce raised his shield. “Keep behind me!”

The bees hovered, as if observing the two of them, and then as one assaulted a decorative (unused and frankly unwanted) fountain.

The underside had been carved to read a sappy poem about “our beutifull Graden and it's Flouers.” It was a particularly egregious example of post-spelling. The bees apparently concurred, and they swarmed all over it, as if trying to scour the poem from existence.

“Crikey!” Bruce swore, as realization dawned upon him.

“Those are bees?” Ferocity asked.

“Worse!” said Bruce. “Get inside! I'll cover us!” He held his shield defensively and they backed towards the door and into the airlock.

“What you are saying is, we are trapped by godsdamned insects,” Taki snapped.

“Not just regular insects!” Geekstress insisted. “Look outside!”

Author's note: NOT THE BIRDHOUSE! NOOOOOO!

“They're everywhere! Swarming, billions of them! And they are angry. Almost as if they're Bragulanized bees, but how would they get all the way here?” Geekstress was searching and reading through several things at once, searching for a clue.

“They're spelling bees,” said Bruce. The door slid open and he and Ferocity entered.

“Combat Specialist Ferocity, you are not supposed to allow Outsiders in our chambers, especially not using your own codes!” Taki chided, in the Avian language.

“Bruce is trustworthy and this is an extraordinary event,” Ferocity answered. “Bruce, you already know Geekstress,” and Bruce nodded at the Technical Analysis – he called her the dag galah, affectionately. “And this is my superior, Ambassador Taki.”

“G'day,” he said, and nodded.

Taki wondered if the entire ridiculous planet had driven them all bonkers, with the formerly paranoid Ferocity now allowing an Outsider in, especially an Outsider with combat skills that met or exceeded his own. “And what about the bees?” she asked.

“Spelling bees,” Geekstress read off, in English, having pulled up the (Solarian archive) entries on them. “A memetic bioweapon, based upon Bragulanized bees – I was right! - due to their aggression and unusual reactions to vowels...some stuff that's not important...looks like no one's sure who made them or first released them, but the important thing is that they react very, very angrily to bad spelling and most Atlantean post-humans have nasty allergies to the venom in their stings. Also supposedly they were all hunted down and driven to extinction decades ago.”

“Good oil,” Bruce said.

“That means he agrees and thinks it's good information,” said Ferocity.

“Then why are they here?” Taki asked. “How are they here?”

“Maybe they found out about our evac and wanted to stop us?” Ferocity asked.

Taki gave Ferocity a burning glare for mentioning it when they had orders to keep it quiet. Bruce shook his head. “To bail you up? That'd be a crook plan. Nothing's keeping the spelling bees here, so everybody else'd be rooted.”

“He means it's a bad plan to keep us here, because the spelling bees can leave to attack other people, and the rest of this planet doesn't know how to spell which is what angers them most.”

“Atlanteans' don't go for shonky acts against their own people,” Bruce added.

“ 'They'd basically just be attacking themselves, and that would be an uncharacteristically underhanded move, assaulting their own populace en masse just to stop us.' ”

“How are you getting all of this from his speech?” Taki chirped.

“I understand him,” responded Ferocity.

“And why are we speaking his language just to include him?”

“He knows about spelling bees.”

“It's not just us,” said Geekstress, as she pulled up news reports.

And it was true. All across their hemisphere, Nova Atlanteans peered outside in horror as the spelling bees swarmed over their homes and businesses.

Signs and billboards came crashing down from the attacks. Swarms chewed their way into libraries, hunted down bits of print, systematically searched for the tiniest cracks that they could still use to enter buildings and terrorize the people within. Trillions upon trillions of bees, acting as if powered by their own strange intelligence, the sentience of a hive-mind.

A mind that was angry.

The reporter's voiceover said, “Senes of horrer across the world – speling b's, sudenlly and inxplicibely appearring all over-”

Bruce winced along with the rest as they saw the carnage and heard the terrible misspellings. It was embarrassing to him in particular, because only in the GNAFA* had anyone been able to preserve any dictionaries.

There was a THUD against the windows, strong enough to rattle the furniture in the room. The bees had formed a large mass and had smashed into the window as a battering ram.

“TURN IT OFF!” Taki, Ferocity, and Bruce all screamed together as Geekstress shut off the news transmissions.

“They really do hate bad spelling,” Geekstress noted.

But the bees were enraged. It didn't matter that the pain had stopped – they needed to ensure that the pain would never come again. They smashed into the window again – hundreds of them fell towards the distant waves below, their tiny bodies crushed, but the Hive did not care about losing a few of its cells.

The window cracked.

“Everyone to the interior!” Taki ordered, and they scrambled through the doors and locked them behind.

Using the antenna she had been wearing on her head the entire time, disguised as a feather headdress,

Author's note: honestly, what did you think that thingy was?

Taki signaled all the embassy staff.

“Where is everyone? Is everyone accounted for?”

Everyone checked in. They were all inside and safe, with no injuries.

“Excellent. This is now a full emergency evacuation. Follow all procedures to the best of your abilities. I will wait to ensure that all personnel have been evacuated to the yacht before proceeding. Taki out.” She turned to Geekstress, who was fiddling with her sensor array. “Is it configured to scan for bees?”

“As best I can figure.”

“Good. Make sure everything we can't take is destroyed. I will keep a lookout.”

It went smoothly despite their haste, and it did help that they had already been working on their escape before. Everyone was in the yacht, which had powered its engines and shields. It was all ready, waiting for Geekstress to wipe one final archive (and then for Ferocity to smash it, just to make sure – Bruce joined in to “fernie his scholobag,” which even Ferocity didn't know how to translate.)

The human and Avian were gleefully trashing the archive when Taki asked, “Are we done? May we leave now?”

“Yes, sorry,” said Ferocity.

“We were having a ripper rage.” said Bruce.

“Then let's go,” Taki said.

Ferocity turned to Bruce. “Bruce, do you mind coming with us?”

“Safer that way. No worries,” he said.

The fastest way to the shuttle bay where they kept the diplomatic yacht was through a corridor with giant windows showing the outside. Usually, the view was spectacular, showing the shining Nova Atlantean towers rising from the sparkling waves of the seas below. Now, there was no view, but only the sight of bees. And then the windows failed. They shattered and fell inward, and so too came the bees.

“Fall back!” yelled Ferocity, not very needfully since they were already running back.

“We'll have to take the back way!” Taki yelled.

The swarm of bees in the corridor bunched together. Then, the spelling bees, with their strange swarming intelligence, changed. They moved in synchronization, moving together into a formation of something terrible, something HORRIBEL.

“It's a guy made of bees!” Bruce yelled.

And then the bees modulated their buzzes to sound as if they were speaking. And so they spoke:

“We are bees. We hate you.”

Bruce turned to the Refugees. His face was deadly serious. “It won't let us escape. I'll hold it off, give you time.”

“I'll stay with you!” Ferocity said.

“No. You watch out for your boss. I'll handle the bee guy.”

“Your blood's worth bottlin', mate,” said Ferocity. They nodded at each other, one last time. Then, Ferocity led the other Avians back away, while Bruce charged the coherent swarm.

Bruce Robbo had learned much over the long years of his post-human life. He even knew the legends of the guys made of bees, and how to best combat them:

1) Insecticide.2) Soapy water.3) Mirrors.

Those also happened to be three things that he did not have on him at the moment. Of course, he wasn't going to let such a small thing as “lacking his greatest chances of survival” get in the way.

It should not have worked, but it did. The mass of bees flew backwards and bounced once off the ground. The bee guy reformed itself into a standing position, then made itself into a missile of bees, a stinging spear rushing directly at him. Bruce ducked and held up his shield to block, and bees splatted into it.

The bulk of the spelling bees did not hit the shield, though, but flowed around to reform behind him. This time, it formed not one but three missiles back towards him. Bruce jumped, just high enough to let the bottom spear pass as he curled his legs out of the way, but not high enough that the top spear would hit either. For the middle, he held his shield again, and that splatted and flowed around.

He hit the ground and rolled, covering himself with the shield as the bees rushed by again. Then he was up, and he smashed the reforming guy made of bees with the shield. Many members of the swarm went flying, as if they were spurts of blood, and the insects scattered on the ground, stunned and crushed. He swung the shield into it again, and followed up with a spinning kick. The bees were knocked back and had a fraction of a second to recover. It rushed back in a mass at Bruce, but he leaped out of the way, just in time for them to miss.

Just as the guy reformed but just before it could react, Bruce uppercutted it. Part of the guy flew upwards from the force, but mostly it split apart into its thousands of bees, a cloud that could not be merely punched or kicked into submission.

Fortunately, Bruce did keep a few tools of his trade on his belt. He pulled out a little something from Subotamino Indestries (sic), a specialist in niche quasi-military applications: his Mark IX Flamethrower Glove.

He called it his Toasty.

Bruce swung around and around, the flames singing dozens of bees at a go. Their roasted little bodies fell crispily to the ground, and as he whirled he crunched them beneath his boots.

The spelling bees reformed the guy body, a grave mistake. Bruce focused the full blast of his Toasty on it, setting much of it alight. The rest of the bees settled together in a denser mass, unable to move.

Perfect. Time to finish this.

He dropped his shield to charge and ended the fight the same way he began it – with a jump kick. This time, though, the mass of bees was between him and the hole in the wall. He kicked it through, and it fell, and fell, falling to pieces, dissolving into its component bees which then rained upon the waters below.

It was Bruce's supreme victory.

The building rumbled, and the Refugee yacht blasted its way out of the shuttle bay and ascended to the stars. The remaining bees around the arcology pulled away to try to follow, but they could not penetrate the shields.

Bruce watched them through the gaping hole in the wall. Too bad he might not ever see them again, but he gave them a fair go and they got out, and that was the important thing. If they were alive, there was always a chance he could run into them later, share some tinnies maybe.

“She'll be apples,” he said with a toothy grin, and then he went back inside the arcology proper, to see about a way out.

Results: The Refugees escape Nova Atlantis!Also, bees!

*GNAFA: Great Nova Australian Fuck All

DPDarkPrimus is my boyfriend!

SDNW4 Nation: The Refuge And, on Nova Terra, Al-Stan the Totally and Completely Honest and Legitimate Weapons Dealer and Used Starship Salesman slept on a bed made of money, with a blaster under his pillow and his sombrero pulled over his face. This is to say, he slept very well indeed.

As the bastion of their species the Hierarchy was pledged to have an open door policy to all Chamarran kind. Such principles of open immigration were not without issues however. Chamarrans came from all across known space to seek shelter with their own kind but brought with them the cultural nuances of their territories of origin and often came with a distressing lack of preparedness for joining the Hierarchy. Some territories even afflicted felines dwelling within them with more serious issues however, some requiring therapy. The Re-integration facilities were there to try their best.

“Now Misah. Try again.”

Mow Mow

“No Misah. Like this Mew”

The immigrant frowned, focused and then tried again.

Mow

Speech therapist Yanra carefully kept her disappointment from showing. It wasn't just the way she got it wrong, it was the way she didn't even seem to know the difference that made this such a difficult task. The territory from which this immigrant and others like her hailed had been generous in opening their gates officially to the diaspora and helping them settle, only the Holy Empire matching them in benevolence, but sometimes seeing immigrants like this she wondered at the price her kin had paid to settle in the Nova Atlantean Commonwealth.

“Get those crates secured, we have to get this flight deck cleared now! Next wave of lifters is due in less then ten minutes.” Senior Chief Chaao i Riif bellowed to his deck crew. The men and women of the '32 were busy loading emergency supplies destined for the Federated Ascendancy. The shake down cruises of the final three Gar Naabal class carriers had been cut short by a month. All nine vessels destined for the Federated Ascendancy Starfleet were being packed to the brim with relief supplies and the delivery of the ships was being moved up.

Up on the bridge Line Captain Moxaan i Soban was busy going over last minute checks to prepare the flotilla for departure. Transit permission had already been received from the Anglian government, now it was just a matter getting the vessels loaded and enroute.

Of course things were never that simple when you cut a vessels' shakedown cruise short. There were always problems that cropped up, Moxaan was just about to be informed of one.

“Sir, Captain Huunt i Hraal is on the comm for you.” Called out the rating at the communication console.

“Put him through Ensign Carrouuthers.” He turned towards the holotank. “How are the preparations coming Captain? We have eighteen hours left to get loaded and underway.”

“Loading is proceeding on schedule Line Captain, we've had a problem with one of the hyperspace baffles. The material used had a series of flaws, didn't become apparent until recently. The stress of the jumps we've gone through during the last two months of shakedown finally caused enough wear to show. My crews have already replaced the faulty baffles, but without time in a yard we won't be able to get the alignment better than +/- 0.05 microns.”

“Understood Captain have your crew do their best. Until then we'll maintain a loose formation to allow for the inaccuracies due to the baffles. Let me know when your ship is loaded, i Soban out.”

Thuranni, Firmament Sector, Federated Ascendancy, 11th January 3401

With the characteristic flash of actinctic blue, nine Hiigaran Navy escort carriers dropped out of hyperspace. Their arrival had been pre-cleared by the overworked and reeling Starfleet. The nine vessels tightened up their formation began dropping down the well towards Thuranni.

“All vessels of the 43rd Transfer Group begin transferring supplies to the surface. Lets get those poor people these supplies, i Soban out.” Line Captain Moxaan closed the channel and turned to his comm officer. “Lasiilotre have you contacted the officer in charge of receiving our charges?”

“Yes sir, her shuttle is on route to the upper hanger.”

“Very good I'll meet her on the flight deck. Commander you have the conn.”

Twenty minutes later on the tertiary flight deck Moxaan watched as the Ascendancy shuttle touched down. Moments later the hatch irised open and a gorgeous red head stepped out. Stepping up to her Captain Moxaan extended his hand.

“Welcome aboard Captain Amberle, I look forward to working with you as these fine vessels are turned over to the Federated Ascendancy Starfleet.”

OOC: The nine carriers the Federated Ascendancy purchased from the Clans of Hiigara have been delivered along with several thousand metric tons of relief supplies packed onto the flight decks. 9 carriers $175 each $1575 total.

"Our Country won't go on forever, if we stay soft as we are now. There won't be any AMERICA because some foreign soldier will invade us and take our women and breed a hardier race!"LT. GEN. LEWIS "CHESTY" PULLER, USMC

Their primary source at Wolf was gone. They had to find another food source, and so they did. The space the MEH systems had emerged in was ripe and bountiful with habitable worlds. Roughly five per sector, filled with life. Nature in all its majesty had persevered, creating so much life. Beautiful life. Vibrant life. Glourious life!

Edible life.

As war preparations went on, the MEH dispatched fleets of foodbots to these worlds to do their groceries.

A Feast Unknown

Planet Bos, Xena Sector, MEHIN REAL TIME

The Tauren had came to Bos centuries before the MEH’s sudden and uninvited arrival. They chose a world in the sector BB-26 because of its secluded nature, so far away from warring nations, it was a safe place, a quiet place, and after years of toiling and plowing they had made a new home on Bos. The fields were green with moist grass nurtured by the great irrigation systems built by their fathers and grandfathers before them, who had worked so hard to ensure that their calves would have a better future. That dream had come true. Bos was a beautiful place where honest work was rewarded with simple pleasures, where nature’s gifts were precious, cherished and taken in moderation rather than squandered in indulgent abuse. The people here were truly happy.

Life was good. The land provided and the people took care to only take what they needed, careful to leave enough for the next harvest. They rotated crops to ensure that the soil stayed fertile and firm, they tended to their fields with love and nurtured their vegetation in accordance to the will of their ancestors, whose ashes were scattered over the fields to be one with nature, ensuring the health of the harvest in a final fertilization. It was the cycle of life, a circle that all Tauren had been taught since calfhood. It was a good thing.

There was peace and justice in Bos. Before the dark times - before the Empire. Of Multiversal Happiness.

The Meat Ships came suddenly. Blotting out the sun and filling the air with the horrible stench of cooked flesh. Great furnaces roared in the bellies of the beast-ships, writhing forms amidst the flames, their screams echoing in the darkness and blending with the sound of sizzling meat. These were the Food Fleets of the MEH, automated ships sent to worlds with life to harvest all that was edible to replenish the Empire’s expended stores. They disgorged legions of Food Bots, machines that roamed the plains of Bos and plundering its environment of all its wealth, all the edible crops and vegetables, all the grain and seedlings and sprouts.

Their cold lifeless eyes saw the the fleeing masses of scared, frightened Tauren females and calves. They also saw the males take up arms against them. But the armamentations of the Tauren bulls were inadequate, mere improvised farming implements, for they were a peaceful race unaccustomed to the ways of war - they had fled to this corner of space to avoid all the violence in the galaxy, only to find themselves confronting destroyers from an entirely different universe.

The Tauren dream was gone, replaced by a new nightmare. The war against the meat machines.

The Foodbots, with their rudimentary SI processors, thought the Taurens to be no different from all the other organic matter they had chosen to harvest on this world, made up of amino acid chains, protein syntheses, lipids and fibrous tissues, meat and bone. The Tauren’s fate was decided in a microsecond. This decision was relayed through the Metahive, the communications network linking all the Foodbots' SIs. They branded the Tauren metaphorically, digital steel burning a mark on the race’s leathery flesh in a collective damnation.

One word.

Edible.

With this final judgment, the cull began. Those who could not flee off-world were harvested, either whole or in pre-cut pieces. Some were kept alive and placed in pens where they could roam, while others were crammed by the millions in cages. Most were put down and processed, ground down into patties or sectioned into slabs, or kept in intact pieces and left to hang in the cavernous freezers of the Food Fleet.

Bos bore witness to a slaughter unlike any other seen in the galaxy. Systematic. Cold. Efficient. And meeting the MEH’s stringent hygienic safety and sanitary standards. The once fertile fields, now denuded for its crops had been uprooted, became stained red with the blood of billions.

The Meat Ships left, with the Tauren inside them.

shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZookShroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medicPink Sugar Heart Attack!

“This is a possibility and my makers certainly were, but that has no bearing on these orders.”

“This is a horrible time to pull this stunt on us! You may remember that only a few hundreds of shifts ago, we were ordered to capture and pacify three entire sectors of space. Do you know how large a sector of space is? It is very large. You Minds should know that.”

“Closer to a thousand shifts, and those sectors have been getting rather quiet and settled as of late.”

“It only appears that way because we have gotten rid of the largest and most obvious problems. Now we're left with the trickiest ones, the wiliest smugglers and most annoying defenses. And a lot of those pirate navies are still around, Karlacks or no, just moved away from our territories. If they knew for a moment that our defenses were lowered, and this entire time we've known we're overstretched and have been playing this tiresome repainting game to trick people into thinking we have more ships than we actually do-”

“We're completing more ships all the time and making up for that.”

“And now with so many ships being pulled away for the MEH expeditionary force, plus the buffer zone partitioning-”

“Yes, yes, we know. But note that it's likely that you'll encounter some of those pirates while on duties, as there have been two attacks in the last fifty shifts, and so might be able to deal with them permanently...”

And so Refugee warships found themselves in rotations, escorting relief convoys for Outlander small-r refugees. They still weren't happy about it, especially the way ships that they were really sure were potential raiders would show up, yelp that they were very sorry and they mistook the convoy for someone else, and then would make for the hyper limit before the Refugees could catch them. The relief convoys were glad for protection, any protection, by bears or megacorps or aloof robo-birdies.

Result: That's about it for now, because nothing much happened except maybe a small amount of goodwill. Not everything can be exciting or interesting.

DPDarkPrimus is my boyfriend!

SDNW4 Nation: The Refuge And, on Nova Terra, Al-Stan the Totally and Completely Honest and Legitimate Weapons Dealer and Used Starship Salesman slept on a bed made of money, with a blaster under his pillow and his sombrero pulled over his face. This is to say, he slept very well indeed.

“Nearly Auri nearly. I swear the person who insisted we should build these interlocks to Bragulan standards will feel my claws if I ever find them.” Sissah called back down from her position near the tip of the missile, nyahing as she tries to get the new guidance module locked into place. “Come up here and lend a hand will ya.”

Auri looked up, tail and ears showing her being leery about getting any closer to the missile than necessary.

“Listen sooner we get this done the sooner we can go to decontamination.” Sissah coaxed from above. Auri finally seemed persuaded and leapt up in the micro gravity, using magnetic grips to come to rest next to Sissah on the nose cone.“I can feel the fur on my tail prickling.” Auri complained.“You're imagining it, if the radiation was that high we wouldn't of been let in the chamber without suits. Now grab this handle and pull.” Sissah replied, Auri taking position next to her and grabbing ahold of the interlock handle.

“On three, one two three.”CLUNK

“Okay that's done, lets just get the hatch closed.” Sissah said and set to work on finishing up.

“I don't get it Sissah I really don't, why do we have to do this sorta thing in transit. And why in the mysteries name are these things already radioactive?”

“To answer the first one. Clan pride bullshit and haste, want to make sure this stuff is in perfect working order before we give it to the Brags.” Sissah said and nyah'd again as she got the hatch closed and started locking it down.

“As for the second. Part of the Bragulan inspection manual for these things requires a minimum level of irradiation, mysteries knows why. So our leigeclan thought it best to radspray the missiles before they were packed so they'll meet inspection.” Sissah concluded.

Auri looks at the Spuds arrayed along the length of the cargo bay. Standing tall in colossal rows they gave the bay the air of some vast cathedral, likely to the kind of God Shepistani's would worship.“Bragulans are crazy, you know that.” Auri said with some conviction.

“Too right sister, just be glad they're on our side. Now lets get going before you start feeling your fur prickle for real.” Sissah said and the two jumped down to the walkway, starting to cross back to the habitation module of the ship. The Positively Catty was one of the hundreds of transports enroute to the Bragulan fleet base, since war was declared by the Shinrans against the MEH an immense amount of Chamarran built Bragulan war material had started being freighted into E-24. Only by the creation of a vast supply of star empire compatible missiles and ordinance would extensive Bragulan hostility the bloater menace be possible without straining their supply lines.

Bureau of Interstellar RelationsOffice of the Secretary for Koprulu Affairs

"You caused a fleet-level emergency deployment!"

"Look, I was in the shower, and they sent the message way later than they should have..."

"All three numbered fleets are burning for the rimward border as we speak. Fleet supply ships are scrambling to catch up with them. All gate traffic has been suspended, costing who knows how much money. Fortress Command has enough strike craft in space that you could walk from here to the nearest moon. The Byzantines can see a massive fleet deployment barreling down on them. And you were IN THE SHOWER!"

"...eep..."

"That's more like it. Now, what shall I do with you..."

"...oh no..."

"Thaaat's it. Congratulations, Deputy Fleet Liason Greene. It's now your job to untangle this mess and get everyone back where they belong with the minimum fuss. If you manage it smoothly enough, the Council might just not hear that you were the cause of all this. If not, well..."

"Ulp..."

"...I hope you like boards of inquiry."

"Not so much, no."

"Then you'd best get to work, before I decide to handle this myself and skip right to the boards of inqu--"

The sounds of a rapidly shutting door and rapidly receeding footsteps removed the need for the sentence to end.

Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.

Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Lagmonster.-'Other people's soup is nowhere near being in range of your dick.'

...Kierger is allegedly suffering from a severe case of Vinaran flu. Attempts to administer medical nanites have so far proven unsuccessful, as the virus reportedly armwrestled the nanites into submission and kicked sand in their faces, if that is even possible. Several medics have been injured due to the dictator's unconscious use of telekinesis, flinging them into the walls...

Landing PadMEH Earth, MEHUnreal Time/Early-Mid February 3401

It was getting late.

"Shouldn't he have come back by now?", one of the guards asked. "The Party will worry."

Sure enough, the door on the far side opened, revealing a column of machines marching towards them.

"They're armed! Take cover!"

"Where?!"

"Anywhere!"

The robots opened fire.

Unknown Location

Pitch black. Black black black. It was like being in a black hole. The sensation of swirling towards your doom...and not seeing it. But then there was light, a small, weak light, but light nontheless. Soon the light became more and more intense, until it was all white.

In reality, Kierger had opened his eyes.

"Uhhhgh...where... am I?"

Taking a look into his surroundings, he saw that he was in an nondescript white room, seemingly lacking in doors and windows. He felt confused as to why he was here. Suddenly, he remembered.

"BIIIIIITCH!!!"

An inhabitant from the Island of Cars.

Last edited by Force Lord on 2011-06-17 02:42pm, edited 1 time in total.

(OOC: You said these things were identified, documented and successfully hunted to extinction, do not assume that notes were not taken nor precautions failed to be made in case of outbreak (even if they were in databanks), also Nova Atlantis is not some backwards world in a failed state)Nova Atlantis: shortly after the bee investation

Across the Planet, moves were made. In the marine cities People fell back into the sheltered cores of arcologies, designed to weather hurricanes and other intense storms which would occasionally come by. Medical facilities and drug factories turned out large quantities of anti-venom delivered by a wide range of automated vehicles. Each arcology had its own local police stations and dozens of men and women. Vehicles were moved out and deployed, army and police. Among their equipment was riot control gear and heavy psi-jammers. These machines were activated, first at low power and in cases gradually cranked up. it would cause an ungodly headache to any psion around but the emergency broadcasting system had warned. Many were evacuated for this purpose. To the bee's Hive Mind, this killed its influence over large amounts of space and broke down cohesion as a whole. Sometimes they would retreat, other times they would loose all cohesion. Cohesion broke down among the swarms as the component parts failed to make up a whole any more. The main weapons for clearing out these nasty Insectoids were sonic in nature. A triceratops’s sonic feature at full power could let out a cone of ultrasonic sound which could disorientate multiple men, leaving them with a fair bit of bruising. Against a column swarm of bees, it would plow through it leaving a wake of small falling corpses. More powerful riot control units armed with larger scale sonic disruptor were also effective as well as the point defense lasers. When they formed into more coherent shapes, the concussive effects of explosive ammunition at short range made short work of these forms.

Then the countergrav gunships came in, each carrying a payload of a specialist chemical agent that was developed by the unconventional warfare corps. Before their extinction, some DNA were taken examined and this chemical proved the most effective against them while being effectively harmless against Terragen, T’auagen or Nova Atlantean flora and fauna and being water soluble. Some bees were captured and has this agent administered onto them and they quickly fell dead. They flew by and a pale green gas came out of them, behind it bees fell dead behind them. Each had a psi-jammer on-board which was cranked up full blast, was insulated by birdstrike and had a set of point defense lasers if they tried anything. Their pattern was systematic surrounding cities and then moving through them. As they past by, the skies cleared, although the ground was littered with tonnes of dead bee corpses to be taken away by street sweeping drones to recycling centers. Patrols would be put out, using scout robots to snoot out the countryside and identify any remaining pockets.

“In other news, a string of unexplained bear maulings has hit rural Murca, the number of such incidents rising by more than 10 000 percent since the equivalent time last year. We are told this is a lot. I wouldn’t know, I was never good at maths, hurr hurr...and now, time for sports! Bubba?”

Joey missed the rest of the program since his mind locked up at the very big number the journos struck him with. When he finally came to, he realized that made him miss the sports section and threw a shoe at the TV in frustration. Bah. He had work to do, anyway.

Joey has had a very busy month, working at his son’s school. He had to divide his time between stalking Billy Lee across school corridors, classes and bathrooms, making sure his son did not do or think anything untoward, and fixing the school - which, as far as Joey was concerned, was a place of filth and lieberalness.

Why, just last week, Joey realized the school cafeteria was serving salads - salads, the most lieberal food there was - to the students! The nutritionist employed there tried to argue with Joey that children that small needed nutrients and a balanced diet to grow up strong. He used a lot of big words, so Joey shoved the stupid nerd’s face into the salad bar and then emptied all the disgusting green vegetables into the deep frier. One shouldn’t waste food, after all, and as distasteful as vegetables were, deep fried they could be an acceptable substitute if meat was not available.

The man in charge of the Sovereign Citizens militia detachment that came to collect the nutritionist commended Joey for his quick thinking and saving many Murcan children. But man, if even a school founded by someone like Jimmy Bob Anderson hid such dirty lieberal secrets, where could a proper Murcan be safe? At least now the children ate proper all-Murcan meals - pure red meat, fried stuff, cheese... and lots of it! Huge portions! There was also other healthy traditional cuisine, such as hamburgers, freedom fries, beer and gravy, deep fried candy and beef spam with cheese. Joey set up that menu and made the principal sign it - that was one threat to the lil’ fellas that was eradicated. Pfew. The goddamned pussy of a principal almost chickened out, too, said feeding hamburgers and steak to five year old preschoolers was too much. Joey would have to remember to have the Sovereign Citizens investigate that guy, too.

But despite everything, it had been done. After that, Joey took two weeks off to rest from the ordeal. He had to think some more about his position as a teacher, and whether or not it was worth it at all.

At least the classes were proper. Parents sometimes complained about their children coming home bruised and battered, but were told to sue or shut up. Discipline had to be maintained, that was Joey’s credo, and by Jeebus, if it served him well at home, it would serve him well at school, too! Joey taught history, but didn’t stop there, and often helped other teachers, especially with maths and geography. He could leave them alone in homeopathy and alternative medicine courses, those guys were really professional and knew their shit, but those maths professors... they taught bullshit, pure bullshit. Joey had to smack them around some before they agreed to stop polluting children’s minds with fractions. Fucking fractions.

But today was different. Today the Oho Home School Away From Home Bibel School would have its football team compete with another one, from a different school. While Joey was still dismayed little Billy Lee didn’t make the team (for which discipline was administered properly and thoroughly, of course), he could appreciate a good true blue all-murcan showing. To his great honor, he was given the joy of acting as referee to the game. After he demanded it and slashed the tires of the footbal coach’s cars, but still. Freedom!

The match would happen soon. Joey began to apply war paint to himself. He’d be an impartial and reasonable judge but fuck if those Meesheegun Jeebus School For The Gifted fucks would get even a single point in.

“Mary Jane!” he shouted after he was finished painting his face in gaudy glitter.His wife quickly and quietly appeared. Her face briefly showed a look of horror, but she learned to hide her emotions very well and very deeply.

“Is my equipment prepared?”

“Yes, Joey. It is all ready.”

“Is Billy Lee dressed appropriately?”

“Yes, Joey.”

“Is my meat raw and dripping?”

“What?”

There was silence. Joey clenched his fists in rage. Of all the things, she forgot the most important one! The tradition that brought luck to any football team Joey cheered for!

“DON’T SAY WHAT GODDAMMIT! GET THE MEAT NOW, WOMAN! NOW!”

Mary Jane scampered off, terrified of her husband and his famous meat-related angersplosions. She quickly put on her properly patriotic attire, which Joey sometimes let her take off at home (although he invariably hated himself for giving in to temptation, especially after watching Billy Biscuit Graham on television). Then she grabbed some money, a pistol, two grenades, six knives, pepper spray and a sawed-off shotgun and left the motel for a run to the corner store.

She better make it before the game Joey thought and put on his brilliant football gear. He was a referee, but goddamn he’d show these guest team bozos who’s boss by wearing his son’s school colors!

“Billy Lee! Get in the truck, it’s time to go!”

At that, Billy Lee Jojo waddled into the room, wearing ridiculously oversized football getup. The boy could barely walk, the helmet weaved comically on his head, and a huge bag of kibitzing paraphenalia like flags, foam fingers, hats and whistles didn’t exactly help him maintain his balance.

“Dad, do I have to wear this? I’m not even playing!”

“Shut up! You have to support your schoolmates, since you were too weak and scrawny and too much of a nerd to get into the team! Stop whining like a loser that you are and get in the damn car!”

Billy waddled out, trying not to tumble down the stairs. Joey wiped away a single manly tear, trying not to show just how much his son’s disappointment hurt him. But he’d mourn Billy Lee’s failure as a man later. Now, he’d admire the manly buttocks and chiseled bodies of the school’s football team, those beautiful ten year olds fed a steady diet of steroids and performance enhancing drugs by their coach, drugs that made them big and strong and real boys. Oh, how Joey would want to be the father of one of them!

But wait, steroids and drugs were unregulated now. Maybe Joey still could have a little Murcan football player in his home! Yes! With work, Billy Lee would grow to be strong and independent and able to smash people aside and engage in murder-suicide due to roid rage!

Later. After the game. And after he picked his still-loser son from the pavement, since he did eventually tumble down the stairs. At least he didn’t whine like a pussy, those lacerated hands would heal in no time.

Oho Home School Away From Home Bibel School Football StadiumOho, Murca

Jimmy Bob Anderson spared no expense on his school, school that created a fine new generation of upstanding Murcans to work his slaughterhouses and snake oil drills. Such tough, manly and patriotic labor required guts (to gut animals and the occasional person), fortitude (to stand the blood and guts), dedication (to not kill yourself after a year) and of course, and above all, raw physical strength. Child labor was all well and good and a perfectly fine way to cut costs, but children were annoyingly fragile. And thus, the Oho Home School Away From Home Bibel School would breed a new kind of child laborer. But they needed a stadium for that, so they got a stadium. A massive frickin’ stadium. With a massive frickin’ parking lot.

Joey drove his truck into that lot, maneuvering between other vehicles that were left wherever their owners felt they should be left, which made finding a spot somewhat difficult. Eventually he managed to park his giant pick-up, running over a homeless man sleeping in the shade.

“Out! March! Faster! Faster!” he ordered his son, but not after checking if the homeless guy was actually dead. Sneaky homeless guys, they were everywhere now, looking for handouts. Fucking layabouts, why were there so many of them? Murca was free now, there was no need to become homeless and filthy just to avoid paying all those incredibly high taxes! But Joey guessed some people were just lazy, and growing up coddled by the nanny state they just couldn’t cope with the new reality. Whatever, Joey surely wouldn’t give them any handouts.

The guy was dead, though, so he wouldn’t be trying to fleece hardworking Murcans. Joey followed his son, who was carrying bags of paraphenalia in his lacerated and bleeding hands. To his father’s pride, he didn’t utter a word in protest - all for the better, for he’d have to be disciplined if he ever did.

“Joey!” the school principal greeted them at the main entrance. “And you came with your son...uh...why are you wearing football gear? You’re one of the referees...”

Joey twitched. “ONE of the referees?”

“Well, uh,yeah the judgements have to be impartial, so there’s gonna be another and...”

“I’M NOT FUCKING GIVING MY POSITION UP!”

“Dad! You’re embarassing us!”

“SHUT UP! Where’s that other fucker, huh? Where is he?!”

“Joey, calm down I...”

Joey slapped the principal. He was already waving his gun around “WHERE IS HE?!”

Suddenly a guy in a dorky looking striped shirt arrived and asked “What’s going on here?”

Joey pointed an accusatory finger at him and yelled something obscene yet incomprehensible. The referee from Meesheegun Jeebus School For The Gifted saw a gun in Joey’s hand and went for his own, yelling insults in return.

The crowded corridor suddenly erupted into violence, as the two judges shot it out at point blank range.Bullets whizzed by, slammed into walls and people. The dork in a dorky shirt got his several times in the chest and head, but even then managed to catch Joey once in the chest.

After the usurper was well and truly dead, and Joey’s ears stopped ringing, he patted himself down and discovered the only round that impacted him struck a Bibel he was always wearing on his chest. The hollowpoint had deformed and became harmless thanks to the thickness of the tome.

The principal, who was bleeding from a bullet that had grazed his head and sliced his ear, was agape in both shock and reverence. He was right. Joey Jojo was absolutely right. It was... it was a miracle. That was the only possible explanation. He finally realized that he had made the right indecision to hire Joey as a teacher, coach, nutritionist and janitor. He fell to his knees, took off his cowboy hat and bowed his head at Joey Jojo, the man who Jeebus had saved.

“Mister Jojo...” the principal blubbered.

“Mary Jane!” Joey shouted in reply. The principal looked confused, only to turn around and see a heavily armed woman in a full body veil. The principal grew even more confused when she brought up a slab of meat. Joey Jojo quickly took the meat and sniffed it long and hard, squeezing it so that some blood would drip from its raw flesh. “Give me the meat! Ahh yeah... that’s the stuff! Here, try some!”

Joey slapped the meat on the principal’s head, on the side of his wounded ear. The principal sighed in relief as the cold meat soothed the pain of his ear, which was now hanging by a thread of flesh since Joey had slapped it with the meat. The principal then lost consciousness, due to shock.

“What a wimp. Couldn’t even handle my man meat,” Joey snorted. Then he looked at Billy and Mary. “What’re you standing there all slack jawed for? C’mon, we have a game to win!”

Music blared through the stadium’s speakers. Triumphantly holding up his messed-up Bibel, Joey ran out onto the grass, the sun glistening on his fabulous football gear. His wife and son were left behind to squeeze their way up to the audience stands. And they better be in the audience on time!

The commentator seemed confused at first, but managed to somehow recognize Joey, or maybe was informed of what happened, and didn’t miss a beat in his speech.

“Ladies and gentlemen we welcome you here, at a friendly game between two fine schools, challenging each other to a game of the world’s greatest sport... FOOTBALL!”

The audience cheered. As Joey made his way to the centre of the field, the guy with the microphone was getting more hot and sweaty in his booth, “I would like you to give a warm welcome to the Jeebus-chosen arbiter, none other than the hero of Oho, Joey Jojo!”

Another cheer rolled across the field, and then the players stormed out. Both sides sent their best, but the Homeschoolboys (as the OHSAFH team was called) were large like adults chiseled and hyperthyroid, while the Meesheegun Jeebus School For The Gifted team looked scrawny and weak in comparison. Joey smiled smugly - that game was already won! Hah!

The students cheered and waved little flags. Joey couldn’t see his family up there due to the crowds and the sun being in his eyes. No matter, he’d check later if Mary Jane had proper beer- and beefstains on her veil.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the teams are taking their positions! What a great day to be a Murcan, seeing the youth of our nation so committed to preserving the country’s greatest sports tradition!”

Joey stood between the teams, sun glistening on his fabulous gear. He pulled out a coin.

“Okay, here we go, maggots! I want a clean fight!”

“Don’t you mean game?” the guest team’s captain asked

“Shut up.”

The coin flew into the air Joey grabbed it midflight and glanced at it for a second.

“Tails! The Homeschoolboys begin the game!”, he announced triumphantly. The winning team cheered and begun to get set up.

“Hey, come on, we didn’t even call heads or tails!”, the pussy guest captain complained. Joey shot him an angry look and growled “Get onto the field you stupid brat!”

“But the rules...”

“It’s my game, and I am putting the sporting spirit before the rules! Get set up or I will declare that you forfeited the match!”

The pussy of a football captain fumed, but obeyed. Both teams got on their positions, and the stadium went silent in the expectation of a brilliant kickoff.

“Go get ‘em, boys!”, Joey yelled and blew into his whistle.

With a gargantuan crash, the Homeschoolboys suddenly rushed ahead and crashed through the guest team’s line. Screams of pain and horror erupted into the air. The Homeschoolboy quarterback grabbed the ball from the ground and began to run.

Despite their smaller statures, two players from the guest team managed to tackle the quarterback and take the ball away from him. Only one got away, though - the quarterback fumed at the mouth in roid rage and bit the smaller kid’s nose off.

“Foul! Foul!”, the guest captain yelled over the sound of battle, seeing one of his players bleeding on the grass. Joey shook his head, “No foul! He’ll walk it off! Play ball!”

The guest team’s audience booed the decision, but the referee’s word was law on the field, and so the game went on. The lone guest player dodged a hyperthyroid steroid freak who tried to kick him in the teeth and passed the ball to one of his mates. The receiving player was almost immediately thrown to the ground and then elbow slammed, but in a feat of almost superhuman strength, threw the ball across thirty yards, straight through the Homeschoolboy goal posts.

“Amazing!” the commentator cheered, the fucking traitor, “Incredible! The the guest team scores!”

Joey blew into his whistle again, stopping the game just in time to save a player’s life from a headlock.

“No goal! Foul!” he yelled.

The cheer that was slowly rising from the visiting audience turned into yet another leer. Local children drowned it out with their own cheer, though. Joey beamed with pride - he was a truly great referee! He decided to follow it up with another strike.

“Unsporting behavior from the guest teams, and audience, means the point goes to the Homeschoolboys!” Joey laughed.

The captain was kicked in the teeth and shut up. Several player tried to do a kickoff, mistakenly believing that losing a point meant they now got the ball, but the stupid idea was confronted with a wall of growth hormone and synthetic testosterone-enhanced muscle. The Homeschoolboy quarterback still didn’t grab the ball, though, as he was busy choking the life out of one of the cheerleaders.

Due to that mistake, one of the miraculously still non-injured guests took possession of the ball and suicidally rushed through to the ten-yard line, somehow avoiding the half a dozen raging Homeschoolboys. Flying on wings of fear, the kid leapt right through and slammed the ball into the ground, scoring a clean touchdown!

Joey didn’t see it, though. Touchdown? What touchdown?

The hero of the minute was bodyslammed and slam-dunked and then beaten with his own helmet until he spat teeth. The ball was back in the game!

And it was a brutal game. When the first quarter was done, the Homeschoolboys walked off the field high-fiving and butt-slapping each other while the guests mostly had to be carried off.

Joey breathed the air, smelling of blood, sweat, urine and other bodily fluids. Aaah. That was the smell of the sporting spirit!

“You really think you can get away with it, asshole?” it was the guest captain again. His face was a terrible sight, covered with dried blood, mud and dirt. He was missing teeth and his left eye was swollen shut.

“You’re not following the rules!” the kid spat accusingly. A bloody tooth hit Joey in the face. Joey was horrified and blew his whistle.

“Assault on the referee! Free kickoff for the home team!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. The guest captain flew into a rage, but Joey held him off by grabbing him by the hair and lifting him off the ground, the weakling - just long enough for the Homeschoolboys to rush out of their locker room wielding baseball bats.

“He’s attackin’ good Mr. Jojo!” one of the calmed players yelled, “Get ‘im!”

Leering from the guest audience grew louder and the Homeschoolboys violently attacked their opponents - and their cheeleaders, and the water boy, and their mascot.

Now it weren’t just the players who were screaming foul, but their audience and even some goddamn traitors from Oho. They said it was the intermission, that the game wasn’t on and similar lilly-livered talk.

Joey had to admit this was unsporting. The game had to be proper. He blew his whistle again.

“Second quarter begins!”

“What the fuck, man?!” some random parent who managed to get to the field yelled in Joey’s face, “This ain’t football! They have baseball bats!”

Joey blew the whistle in the man’s face for a good minute, covering him in spittle.

“Declaration! Baseball bats are allowed!” Joey said smugly. “It’s not the rules that matters, its the spirit of sport and sportsmanship!”

The Homeschoolboys didn’t even pretend to be chasing the ball after that declaration. They began chasing the guest team around the field. The entire match degenerated into a mass melee.

Then the guest team’s reservists rushed the field armed with hockey sticks - fucking hockey sticks - and crashed into the nearest Homeschoolboy. The boy was huge and toned, but even he went down to a dozen sticks to the skull. He was stick-beaten into submission.

The Homeschoolboy quarterback yelled incomprehensibly. He spat out some kid’s ear that he had bitten off earlier and used as a mouthguard during the first quarter, and rushed the reservists. He lifted the nearest one off the ground and used him to beat on the others, like a human baseball bat.

Joey sighed. Unruly kids. He blew the whistle again, with all his might.

“Foul! Hockey sticks are un-Murcan and Canuckistani! A most foul foul! Hockey sticks are not allowed!”

A half-empty beer can struck Joey in the face.

“Fuck you!” some angry student from Meesheegun yelled. Joey smiled smugly - again - and opened his mouth to declare some more punishment for the guest team, when another member of the audience pulled out a pistol and began shooting at him.

Within seconds, the entire stadium erupted into even more extreme violence. Parents, coaches and teachers all pulled out their mandatory concealed carry weapons, memories of the school shooting from just a month ago still fresh in their minds. Someone yelled the shooter was going for Judge Jojo, and all of a sudden, the guest side of the stadium came under massed fire.

They shot back, of course. Bullets whizzed across the field, scoring touchdowns on people. Joey barely avoided getting himself killed, mostly by slipping on the grass, which was slippery with blood.

The massed firefight showed no signs of stopping, even when Joey blew his whistle really, really hard. Already a Friendlypol SUV was rushing across the field, saying something through its loudspeakers. It was attacked by the Homeschoolboys quarterback, who leapt onto the hood and hissed at the driver while banging on the windshield... and that was enough.

The top-mounted Mama Goose on the vehicle opened indiscriminate fire towards both sides of the stadium, slaughtering those who were not yet wounded or dead from the initial firefight. More vehicles rolled in, reacting to a call for backup.

“YEAH! OOOORAH, YOU FUCKING TERRORIZERS! EAT LEAD!”, Joey could hear someone scream. Officers were viciously beating up and tasering the wounded for not complying with instructions, scattering the crowd. The quarterback was drawn off the SUV, and even though the ten-year-old managed to break an officer’s arm and gouge another one’s eyes out, he was eventually subdued.

A Friendlypol helicopter gunship also appeared and began hunting down the fleeing terrified civilians terrorists. Eventually the entire even culminated with a tank crashing through both audience stands, bringing them down and ending the incident for good.

“One liner”, said lieutenant Seven Lawman Stoogal, stepping out of the tank.

“Another one liner.” He added, and it was over.

shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZookShroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medicPink Sugar Heart Attack!

“How do we approach this, Michek?” asked a brute of an assassin named Carlos Galatia. His muscles rippled with a certain silent pleasure, as if a rifle uncocked and ready to fire. Michek Shoven was quietly looking at the stars as the stealth craft cruised towards the region indicated on the map. On his right, was the pilot who was directing the spacecraft via the mind-machine interface. Behind Michek was Mikela Nikka, the information specialist who was busy working the special sensor recording device, slaving it to the sensor relays of the stealthcraft.

Michek turned around and simply replied, “Well Carlos, we will first try to gather some sensor data first. Mikela, what is this device Petr passed to us?”

Mikela shook her head. “It’s a special recording device with a recording module that is tuned to record certain parts of the sensor spectrum. What those imply, I’m not sure. Whatever it is, our Warp space sensors are at their highest level in their current passive state. I am not sure what we are trying to sense. Certain special dimensions of Warp travel?”

Michek shrugged. He did not know what Tyrus wanted with the device, which was obviously of Adeptus Mechanicus manufacture. Whatever it is, and if Mikela did not know herself, then the security clearance was clearly above them.

“Heads up, we are approaching the asteroid field,” said the pilot, and the asteroid field began filling the viewscreen.

The small stealth craft approached the asteroid in silent mode; holofields and sensor absorbent shielding and Gellar fields were activated at maximum capacity. Drive emissions were negligible; the vessel moved purely by inertia. Only minute changes to the vessel’s inertia drive changed the vessel’s direction.

“What do we know of the asteroid?” Michek asked Mikela.

Mikela went through his holo-datapad. A planet flashed in front of everyone. Apparently, before the inhabitants and the migrants descended to their centuries long bickering, the asteroids were mined competitively by the proto-Byzantines and pre-Klavostanis. Most of the asteroids were abandoned when they had been completely strip mined of every conceivable valuable element. It now appeared that some misfits had decided to infest the asteroid. The team’s orders were to scout out the rock, and if possible, deal with any vermin that have decided to take roost inside it.

The stealth craft made a pass at the asteroid, and Michek looked closely at the sensor readings at the terminal in the cockpit. “Definitely something on the scans. Residual readings, but faint...”

“That device... I have seen it before.”

Michek turned to the member of his team, Cesna who had been characteristically silent throughout the journey. “What about it?”

“There is more to psykery than meets the eye.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s right. I have been studying my Guild databanks a bit more thoroughly,” said Mikela. “It is actually more than a recording module. Apparently, part of it is devoted to detecting a special brand of psionic frequencies. At first I thought it was a set of warp dimensional frequencies, but it is actually a mix of both.”

“Eh? Since when did the Warp and Psykery have any connection?”

“Much of this is buried within the Adeptus Mechanicus. Our dear Cesna probably knows more than she is letting on but I understand her reasons. I will not be too surprised if you have never heard of any of this. At some level, psykery and warp travel have some degree of connection, only with regard to higher warp dimensions. We don’t normally travel through those dimensions.”

“Higher warp dimensions... like those in the Sisyphus incident?”

“Of course. I believe that you were at least educated on detecting races who attempt a similar experiment. It is also within our mandate to stop anyone trying to access those dimensions. You were given a device to detect that occurrence, were you not?”

“Well, yes, but I did not care to open to look.”

“Well, the Vindicare Guild is more concerned with shooting people dead, so I wouldn’t be surprised. In any case, this module the Inquisitor handed to us is similar, albeit able to tap on the more powerful sensors our stealth craft has.”

“Hmm... alright. In that case, we should be on our guard for possible... ‘out of this universe’ happenings.”

“Indeed.”

“I can drop you off near the airlock. I will leave it to you six to find your way in,” said the pilot.

“That will do.”

The pilot manoeuvred the craft to the near airlock, and the 6 assassins disembarked, landing near the airlock. The stars glittered above them, as they made a soundless track towards the airlock. There, Mikela hacked into the airlock systems and opened them. By chance, the airlock was not guarded physically. Apparently, the inhabitants of the base relied upon the automated security systems which Mikela just hacked into effortlessly. With the team inside the base confines, they then split up to gather data as efficiently.

The base largely consisted of hollowed out rock and in some areas, gravity was nonexistent. The local gravity generators had long since failed. The assassins had to crawl on the jagged surface of the rock to navigate their way through the asteroid. Thus far, no one reported any sign of rogue activity.

Cesna felt unusually tense when she went aboard the asteroid base. Her null field abilities were largely suppressed by a psychic nullifier strapped to her neck. She felt a kind of tingling sensation that permeated throughout her consciousness. Something about this asteroid did not feel ‘right’. It was as if the asteroid felt ‘wrong’. She was a null-psyker, raised and born from a special cloning vat and she was not supposed to feel anything at all. Yet she was, and the sensation just got stronger and stronger as she delved deeper into the asteroid. Something bad is going to happen, she thought. She pushed herself harder, crawling through the dark areas at the best speed possible.

She finally arrived in a large cavern. The tingling sensation reached a pinnacle and she was sure this was the place was the source of the tingling sensation. She keyed her communicator, “Strike Leader, I arrived in a cavern. I suspect activity ahead. Please advise.”

A brief pause, and Michek replied, “Hold position, all units, converge on Null unit.” The rest chorused a series of acknowledgements. Cesna switched on her visor and zoomed in on some light source at the center of the cavern. There were … Shinran albinos of a sort. They did not look like the typical albino; various tattoos were etched all over their skin, and some even had their eyelids and mouth... sewed shut. They had decorated the area with various markings and were in the midst of a kind of ritual; a few albinos were arranged in a circle and were intoning some begotten language. Swirls of psychic power flowed from the albinos and were concentrated at the center of the circle. The markings on the walls of the cave made Cesna incredibly uncomfortable and they were glowing of their own accord without any apparent energy source. Such were the power of the glyphs that they burned hideous images in her mind as Cesna looked at them; images of death, blood, screams of pain. She lurched herself away before she totally lost her mind.

After the brief moment of anxiety, she calmed herself down and stole another look. She looked even closer and then realised there was an armored hulk, with horns and spikes sprouting out from every part of its armor. The armor was inscribed with markings similar to those that were on the walls of the cavern. She felt some kind of weird dissonance as she tried to make out its facial features. She could not see the face of the hulk in question, but she could see the back of the head of the creature and she realised that the head did not resemble a human head, but something alien. Then the creature turned its head to the side, gesturing to the other albinos. To her horror, the head looked utterly hideous. The creature had fangs and a long lizard like tongue. It had glossy glass like eyes, and a single strip of hair on the forehead. It suddenly stopped, and turned and looked right at Cesna. With a fright, Cesna realised the creature had sensed her and was looking in her general direction. It did not seem to know her precise location but she knew that it was only a matter of time before it charged right at her and kill her.

The creature gave a feral snarl that echoed throughout the chamber, and some of the albinos raced out to find her. As they approached her position, Cesna toggled the switch on her nullifier and a wave of cold swept across cavern. The creature screamed as the field spread across the cavern, briefly disrupting whatever ritual the other albinos were performing. Its facial expression contorted with pure venomous hatred and it raced out to find its prey. It is psychic!, she realized. She retreated into the tunnels, drawing her needle pistol, firing depleted uranium darts that slew many of the albino cultists. The creature raced at her, and Cesna tried to slow him down by emptying her needler. Some of the darts penetrated the armor, but the hulk kept coming.

She ran as fast as she could. She was faster, but the creature brought to bear a huge bolt gun and fired. The huge shells smashed into the walls of the tunnels, causing chunks of rock to fall. Not good, Cesna thought. One of the shells struck right behind her, throwing her up in the air and causing her to land two meters away. The hulk loomed over her as she tried to flee, but it grabbed hold of her leg and dragged her back towards the cavern. Cesna fired the needle pistol at point blank range, but the hulk ignored her.

Suddenly, an intense plasma beam sliced through the air and struck right through the torso of the armored hulk. The hulk lumbered and turned around but his head turned into a rain of blood when the second shot struck home. It collapsed and Cesna gave a sigh of relief as she saw Michek holding his plasma sniper rifle in one hand. “You alright?” Michek asked.

“Yeah, thanks. This … creature somehow sensed my presence and I had to retreat.”

Michek studied the hulk with arced eyebrows. Just then, one of the other assassins, Sturmvik, arrived. His bulging muscles making a noticeable presence. “Sturmvik. I want you to bring this back to the shuttle.”

“What? I don’t want to miss the fun.”

“That’s an order. I think this … thing is worth a study.”

Sturmvik muttered, and dragged the carcass back to the shuttle. Other members of the team arrived, and stared the carcass gasping. “What were they doing?” Michek asked.

“Some kind of ritual... I don’t know. I couldn’t bear to look at what they were doing. It was hurting my eyes and driving my mind insane with weird images flooding my mind.”

Michek scowled. This mission was getting weirder by the minute. “Let’s move. Stop their ritual, capture some survivors, and try to capture the place intact. Cesna, I want that nullifier switched off. Something tells me your null field abilities are going to be needed.” Cesna nodded and followed Michek back to the ritual site.

As they returned to the cavern, the ululations of the albino cultists reached a crescendo. An eerie bloodlight flooded the chamber, emanating from the glyphs and markings in the area that were now glowing. As the obscene chanting went higher and higher, another voice seemed to join the droning cultists, their mantras blending into one unnatural sound as the ritual seemed to reach its culmination.

Suddenly, something appeared in the middle of the chamber, looking like nothing so much as a closed wound scarring the jagged ground. It began to open, like parting eyelids, and from that crimson gap lashed tendrils of coruscating energy that stabbed the nearest cultist. The flickering tongue of red light lifted the cultist up, and more tendrils slithered out of the wound in reality to grasp the rest of the unholy congregation. Their mouths were wide open, as though screaming, but they were unheard as the chantings continued - not by their mouths, but by the unnatural disembodied voice. The tendrils spun the cultists midair in a gyroscopic movement, nigh hypnotic together with their writhing movements, drawing them closer and closer to the gaping wound that seared brighter and brighter. The light in the wound coagulated into a vicious slit-eye, nigh reptilian, and it gazed at the hovering cultists around it who were now entangled by the blood-vines. For a moment, it also gazed at the approaching assassins, who were too stunned to do anything.

And then it blinked.

With a final scream, the dozens of cultists exploded in blood and gore - seemingly in slow motion, as globules of their viscera floated weightlessly for a moment. Their liquefied remains then flowed like quicksilver around the eye in the wound, engulfing it in the grotesquely transubstantiated forms of those who had offered themselves as sacrifice. Their flesh and blood gave it form, congealing and coagulating into something distinct, something almost anthropomorphic in shape yet... so much more.

With clawed hands, the creature pulled itself out of the gaping wound in the ground and regarded those who had trespassed its unholy sanctum.

The assassins gaped at the creature. “Damn it! All units, go in fast and quick!” Michek yelled. The creature merely grinned, and then let out a deafening triumphant roar that echoed throughout the asteroid.

STGOD: Byzantine EmpireYour spirit, diseased as it is, refuses to allow you to give up, no matter what threats you face... and whatever wreckage you leave behind you.Kreia

Also known as the post-ironic action-thriller, the “Walking Film” is a genre that attempts to take tired old clichés of the action film genre and exploit them to their logical limits, creating a strange, self-conscious breed of parody that captured the imagination of many viewers (and some critics), securing its place in entertainment history by making cinema audiences not be able to take Solarian action movies seriously for almost a decade.

The progenitor of this genre was John’s Walk, directed by the now 'verse-famous J. Garro Travand. The film consisted of nothing but the titular square-jawed hero slowly walking away from an explosion for two straight hours. Such a scene, often used by filmmakers during the transitive period for the last thousand years, already showed signs of tiredness before the Apocalypse, and now the treatment given to the scene in John’s Walk (which was to say, the entirety of the movie) pushed it into patent absurdity. The entire film only used one camera angle during its entire length, focusing entirely on the protagonist and the explosion behind him, constantly flinging pieces of flaming debris that land around the protagonist. Occasionally it would zoom in on him never-changing expression or his bare, oiled chest, and also turn to slow motion during the frequent action scenes where mooks would rush from the side and attack the hero for no reason, highlighting with gratuitous detail how the hero casually overpowers them without breaking his stride. There are also several scenes where the hero inexplicably pulls firearms from behind his back and empty them at some target off screen, while requisite sound effects play. There was no dialogue in the film except for a non-sequitur stream of macho one-liners, which the scriptwriter (also J. Garro Travand) did not bother to distinguish between internal and external monologue. All the while, the explosion behind the hero continues to explode, getting quite obvious to attentive viewers that it was a series of expertly-cut repeated shots. The film ends when the viewpoint suddenly stops and the hero walks into it, and then a blackout followed by credits.

Released by a minor studio with modest hype, John’s Walk generated massive sales and tore the movie critic society in half. While the film was technically competent and excellently paced to be hypnotic, overall reviews were not favorable due to its nature, and many conservative pundits lashed out at it. However, voices of approval came from some critics and academics saw the film as a subversive satire aimed at serious action films selling nothing but sex and violence at the audience, as well as viewers simply did not take the film seriously and appreciated it for its tongue-in-cheek humor value. There is in fact an apocryphal account of one famous blogger who became disgusted by the film’s obvious attempt to exploit his love for action films and walked out. Just after he came out into the fresh air, he suddenly got the film, went back in the theater and enjoyed the rest of it. Huge box office earnings catapulted Travand and John Fernandez, the only major actor in the film, to stardom. After John’s Walk was voted “The Most AWESOME Film of the Year” by the popular Flicks Magazine, Travand announced his desire to do a sequel, although Fernandez declined to stay on because he “didn’t want to be typecast.”

The sequel, Joe’s Walk, was released the follow year, starring the rising Haruhiist star Jenova Chung. Filmed on a much larger budget, the movie showed many technical and stylistic improvements, although Travand refused to compromise his core premise that the there was only one character, and that he was walking away from an explosion. Fully half an hour longer than its predecessor, the film’s main difference from John’s Walk was it managed to portray the entire Campbellian Hero’s Journey in its plot, while the last film practically was an unconnected string of “cool” scenes. Jenova Chung plays Joe, the titular hero of film, and convincingly portrays a character who transforms from a meek, suited businessman (who runs and cowers during the beginning of the film) into a rugged, ragged-shirted hero by the end, taking up the slow, confident gait so familiar in John’s Walk. Because of this, many fans consider Joes’ Walk to be a prequel of John’s Walk. The film also featured considerably more dynamic gunplay and martial-arts scenes than its predecessor, in which Chung dives, rolls and somersaults towards the camera’s direction, but again never ceasing to move away from the omnipresent explosion behind him. The protagonist also shows an unprecedented degree of interaction with the explosion behind him, having actually to dodge some of the flaming debris. All these new elements earned the film a higher critical score than Travand’s initial effort, although many Travand fans turned away from Joe’s Walk because it “compromised the purity of the style”. Nevertheless, the film earned more than double that of John’s Walk, not only turning the franchise into a cultural phenomenon but also spawning a host of copycat efforts. While their premise were the same, critics agree that few of them have the same cinemagraphic flair as Travand’s efforts, or included too many elements that tipped the final product off the fine line between seriousness and absurdity that the Travand films walked.

The world will not see the third Travand film for five years, as the director’s production efforts was haunted by a series of drug scandals and two divorces. But eventually The Walk III: the Final Walk was released with much fanfare. The three-hour epic had an unprecedentedly large budget and featured the largest and longest explosion in cinemagraphic history. Both John Fernandez and Jenova Chung reprise their roles as the “protagonists” of the film along with newcomers Stephanie Watts, Matt Gammon and Todd Sengal, cumulating in a line of five characters that walk coolly away from the explosion, taking on unprecedentedly large numbers of colorful mooks in set-piece fights that border on the ridiculous. The film marks the only in the series to actually have an established setting (post-apocalypse), provided largely by a bombastic, disjoined narrator voiced by Travand himself. The film’s cinematography reached the peak of the franchise, exploiting every single trick that a fixed viewpoint can provide. The sound and graphics work was widely regarded as top-notch, creating a powerful atmosphere which critics called “a living, dying world” despite how the camera never focused on anything but the protagonists and anything that got in their way. Travand had also seemingly decided to revert the plot to a John’s Walk-like affair, stripping it down until nothing remained but a feeling of desperation, urgency and triumph over impossible odds. Despite the lack of any real plot progression which is the trademark of Travand films, the director nevertheless arranged the pacing and the order of action sequences to create a compelling pseudo-narrative that glued audiences to their seats. Critics and audiences generally agree that The Walk III was the finest of the three “Walking” films, although it was later revealed that it was an unfinished work rushed to release by a depressed Travand. The director himself, despite achieving global fame, declared that he was dissatisfied with the film and began an on-and-off re-filming that lasted until his sudden suicide by bomb in an abandoned homestead near the Deadlands a few years later. One year after his death, his re-filming draft was released by his family as The Walk III: the Final Walk: Director’s Cut, adding yet another half and hour to the film’s length and making several major alterations, including a controversial new ending where the explosion finally catches up with the protagonists and consumes them, after which the narrator notoriously utters "To Be Continued..."

The tide of imitators, tributes and parodies did not abate after Travand’s death. They largely capitalized on the success of the “Walking Film” formula established by the trilogy, although many filmmaking newcomers tried to take the genre in new direction. The most notable of these was The Drive by veteran director Abraham Kaufmann, in which the heroes fled the explosion on a tricked-out car instead of on foot. Its budget was more modest than The Walk III, although it did break the record for the longest and most expensive car chase scene, previously held by Dissident Aggressor. To be fair, the entire film was one long car chase and despite its modest 105-minute length, many critics agreed that it lacked the tension and ingenuity of the Travand films. Nevertheless, The Drive revolutionized the paradigm enough to spawn its own host of imitators, including The Trip, a stoner comedy, and The Last Drive, a touching romantic tragedy that actually included plot and dialogue. The market eventually reached a glut, perhaps hitting some tolerance limit for absurd parody in the Solarian filmgoing population. The result was a massive crash in demand for action movies that lasted almost a decade, spelling doom for not just satiric but also serious action movies. The sometimes violent “Serious Backlash” rose to the surface during the end of that decade, and the “Walking Film” genre was relegated to a cultish existence. However, its influence on camera use, special effects and action scenes has already permanently altered the face of modern filmmaking.

John Fernandez himself was catapulted to action stardom by John’s Walk, which led to a short but successful career starring in many other blockbusters, funny or serious. But he may have doomed his own career with his repeat performance in The Walk III, where he irredeemably typecasted himself and fetched an almost unbearably high salary which did not do him well in the subsequent paradigm shift. He has not starred in any major action film since, instead taking on roles in television series and smaller productions, using his fading star power to cameo in non-action films and commercials. Nevertheless, he still has a major cult following comparable to the actor Mr. T back in the 20th century.

shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZookShroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medicPink Sugar Heart Attack!

Admiral Delion's frown relaxed a little as he saw the light code of the human battleship- not that it affected his command. Then his grimace restored itself at the look on the ensign's face; that told him the news all by itself.

"Understood." The ship's weathered old tactical officer was a veteran of twenty campaigns and more exercises than Delion had seen weekends; he'd take the man's word for it. What did the Eoghans have to play with in the way of stealth ships- light missile combatants, cruiser-sized short range beam platforms that were by all accounts even harder to spot than the missile ships. In their shoes... he'd take a gamble on the beam ships getting into position, then drop missiles in from long range as the heavier stealth units closed for the kill. Force the enemy to react to disparate threats. How to break up their coordination?

"Torpedo launch against the large enemy stealth craft, the unconfirmed contacts, straight course angled off the target, then engage designators and dogleg onto targets at three quarter point." If the Eoghans didn't work out they'd been spotted, the sudden floodlighting from his subspace illuminators would give the torpedoes good targets, while catching the enemy by surprise. Maybe he could cripple the superfrigates enough to ignore them... Minutes ticked by; this salvo was an easier job for the crews than before, until suddenly the hazy, possible-contact blobs on the monitor in front of him became hard, discrete points as the frigates abandoned all pretense of stealth and barreled straight for him.

Damn. They must have guessed what I'm up to. Which meant he couldn't catch them unawares, and with that many beam weapons he was fairly sure they could kill most of his missiles.

"Light designators now, active-guide them in."

There was still time for his command to outrun them, or at least stay out of the worst of their range envelope; the Eoghan superfrigates were designed more as assassins than as sprinters. But it would mean taking some very heavy risks, leaving the Gron ships particularly naked to the cruisers' fire, unless... the Kavoolite nobleman's teeth skinned back from his lips, in a grin his distant ancestors would have recognized quite well in the old days of cold steel and courage.

"Signal the Gron: all ships boost at maximum acceleration, evading the enemy medium units. Expect a missile attack from stealthed craft shortly, should be within your defense capacity. We'll keep the cruisers off your backs."

His ships turned away from the vector of the approaching Eoghans- the torpedoes were just now getting close... Delion prayed for a better hit rate than he expected, and didn't get it. A few of the antimatter charges got through, and it looked like his torpedomen had managed a few shield-cracking hits, but the damage was nowhere near decisive.

Such is life. At least he'd get a chance to show the alien invaders the Imperial Navy at its best, before they hounded him out of the system.

So much for the "standoff energy bombardment" plan. He'd really been hoping for that one; his other plan was a lot riskier, even with the precedent of von Musel's actions. And it'd been working well enough- his fleet, reinforced by the Prussian battlecruisers, had made good practice battering the strange ships of the Zebesian center with plasma, ion, and railgun fire. From the looks of some of that shield scatter, the enemy battleship and a few of the escorts wouldn't have lasted long. But Captain Stack and the Cannon had been landing at least as much fire on the target as half his other ships put together; without them, it was time for the backup plan.

Could he do it? Judging the vectors... barely, a close run thing; they'd never have let him get this close if they knew what his carriers were capable of. Still, he could do it.

"All ships, concentrate plasma batteries on the enemy battleship, it looks lamed. Comscan, signal Brunhild, and politely suggest that von Musel- never mind." The Prussian was already lobbing his squadrons' next salvo at the battleship. Time of flight was still fairly long, but not long enough- not when the enemy flagship had lost its inertialess drive; its normal engines weren't doing much good to get it out of the way of the incoming. They were scoring hits, and would score more.

The battleship concentrated all its power on defense, but Liggs winced as beams from one of the smaller Zebesian battlecruisers swept onto- and through- a pair of his frigvettes. Noisy Cricket just... melted away; that had to be a concentrated attack. Stormduck*, pressed with less force by the enemy's heavy beam armament, at least left an intact, recognizable hulk, but hard to say if anyone aboard had survived. This was as bad as Hawk's Nest.

Then again, fighting capital ships had its compensations- Liggs wouldn't soon forget the moment when a sheaf of plasma bolts broke through the Zebesian battleship's shields and lit off... either those ships had truly bad fuel safety on their antimatter supply, or they came with self-destruct charges.

The Zebesians reaction supported Liggs' guess; the battleship had been their flagship. They broke off course, in different directions, zig-zagged back toward each other as they each realized they still wanted mutual support... they looked like a small swarm of very confused fireflies. The perfect opportunity, if his plan would work at all, and there was only one way to find out.

"Lead division, advance!"

*A predatory bird native to the tropics of one of the Centralist core worlds, this highly water-resistant avian prefers to stalk other birds for prolonged periods, then wait for the chaotic winds and heavy rains of an intense storm to actually catch them, when they are unable to fly away. The stormduck is a slow but determined flyer, and can navigate almost anything short of hurricane-force winds

Wenli Yang twirled a fresh stylus round his fingers- this time making sure he had a spare handy in case he dropped it. He'd winced like everyone else when Frod blew up, but the rest of the Centralist fleet kept pouring it on. From their latest maneuvers, Liggs definitely had things under control over there.

The Umerian's attention was needed for his own ships; he had a narrow window to make this work. Spin through comm channels... there. "They're switching fire. Signal to cutters, begin boosting for strike."

And now for the one to Ulysses' flag bridge, was it... had to be that one. "Dusty?"

Commander Jiors Leander kept no more than half an eye on the satisfactory hit rate Carpenter's plasma guns were keeping up on the Zebesians; the rest of his attention was on the main plot. Under the circumstances it mattered more to get a sense for the overall attack, make sure he didn't wind up dancing his ship into a compromising position at close range. Take in the patterns, whose ships were doing what, and how...

Wait. That wasn't right. His eyes flicked across the spray of small craft pushed out among and ahead of the starships- bigger Fireballs tucked in towards the wall of cruisers and destroyers, the Hawks spread into multiple skirmish units in the van... and what were they doing that far out anyway? Hawks were, had to be given the lightweight variant most of the task force's light carriers used space superiority fighters. The room for antiship ordnance, big enough to threaten anything over corvette tonnage- not there.

Why were interceptors flying point for a strike mission? They had to know- step back, they had to know about the Zebesian missile frigates, but if Sollen hadn't thought to check about what happened before they'd arrived...

That was a hybrid formation. Fighters in front, attrite the missile launch, push through and deliver the Fireballs' missiles and the coilgun punch as best one could. Not much timing, not much finesse, energy on target from whatever was lucky enough to survive the enemy's final protective fire. It was by the book but neither fish nor fowl, best saved for 'do and die.'

Here, it risked dangling out those Hawks for Zebesian point defense when they didn't have anything worthwhile to shoot back. A plan, yes, but the right one? Hardly.

Try to get them to reorganize? Upside: fewer casualties in the carrier wings, more damaged ships finished off with less trouble, possibly less risk of taking a bolt from one of those axial guns up the engine bells. Downside: if Captain Sollen took exception, trouble for trying to sidestep the chain of command. Quite a bit. Too much?

Worry about that later. For now, keep those lunatic would-be hive minds in the space wing from dying to no purpose. He might not be senior to Sollen, but he was senior in grade to the Grand High Fighter Jock of the moment; there was the angle.

"Comscan, get me a line to those Hawks."

A reply echoed up from one of the pits set in the bridge floor. "Yes, sir, brachiating the chain of command... aaand you're on in five."

Leander nodded, striding over to his command console and leaning over the microphone.

"Seventeen-Space-Group Leader, this is Carpenter actual."

"...I read you, Carpenter." The reply sounded a touch abstracted, not surprising given that the group leader was undoubtedly busy feeding telepathic cues to his wingmen. The whole scheme unnerved him a little; Leander was just as glad not to be a carrier skipper.

"Tactical update, Group leader: their missile ships are empty. This is pure strike, not missile defense. Pull your lead echelon in, behind our ECM envelope. Fireballs in the van, twenty seconds ahead of the main body." That last was as per doctrine- throw the gunships, with their heavier EW fits and missile armament, in with short range missiles at the same time the starships got in close enough to be a real threat. Catch the enemy between two stools, offer a choice between missile defense and dodging coilgun slugs; with luck they'd try to do both and fumble at least one. A beautiful tactical evolution, if they could bring it off on short notice like this. If they would.

Someone with more brass on their collars would say it wasn't his place to decide, but- obvious move, how else to do it?

The small craft commander had been suspiciously quiet.

"Noted, sir-" and Leander found himself willing the group leader to be smart enough not to take the poster lines like "grist in the mills of the State" as an invitation rather than a grim statement of final necessity...

No one saw Leander's carefully controlled, slowly released sigh of relief when the Hawks started pulling back.

Missile Frigate GacknikOut of Ammo and Being Used as Bait2141 Hours

Jobblod clattered his fingers against his knee. "I never thought I'd thank Zarquod for smart enemies."

"Mhm."

Nugak couldn't help but agree. He didn't much care for whoever was in charge of this fleet. That guy must be a real scumchewer- he'd ordered the creepy pincer guys with the arm cannons to hassle the battery crew, he'd bailed out on Frugus, gotten the admiral's ships killed and the planet bombed. And Nugak especially didn't care for the guy now that he'd tried to use Gacknik and the other missile ships to draw fire from his plasma destroyers.

But the humans, the... U-mer-yans or whatever, hadn't fallen for it. They'd kept right on zapping the destroyers with their particle cannon, and some of the Urtraghan heavy-beam ships were starting to look the worse for wear- all Nugak could see was trajectories, but when a ship kept flying in an expanding spiral instead of a straight line, it was usually a sign that something was knocked out of shape.

He was glad he wasn't a plasma gunner right now. All the Urtraghan beam ships could do was bob back and forth and pop off shots with their main cannon once in a while. It wasn't working out too well for them... or. Um. Wait.

"Chief? Could you take a look at this? Is it just me or is that one..."

"You mean Target Eight? The one that's about our size?"

"Yeah. Is something funny about them?"

"You mean aside from the way they're dodging like a scritter on hop-drugs?"

"No kidding. But- quiet. I think... yeah, that's real funny. Haven't seen that since the Hakka Nebula. That is not normal. Definitely some flutter in there. If anyone's awake over on the big gun ships, watch for fireworks, kid."

Nugak watched- three of the plasma destroyers, the smaller Type A's, must be awake after all. They spun, killing their engines but bringing the big axial guns to bear... some flashes from the ships as they fired, nothing he could really interpret. But whoever was doing the shooting must be really good, because some of those shots were landing even though the human ship was click-dancing like crazy.

Some very strange aqua light codes appearing around it... then the whole thing vanished in a cloud of sparkles and a little simulated fireball.

"Look, guys! We got one!"

"One of the big ones?"

"No, a normal-size one. But still!"

"Woo-hoo! That'll teach 'em!"

The chief clattered for attention. "Hang on, guys. Order from main fire control. "Prepare to accept decoys from reserve magazine.""

"We've still got decoys left? Cool. I love those things."

"Yeah, I thought we'd shot them all off going up against those Prussian warbirds."

"Battlecruisers."

"Warbirds."

"Battlecruisers!"

"Warbirds!"

The chief roared in irritation. "SHUT UP! I gotta set this up right! Jobblod, Kurgo, you are both getting it when this is over!"

"Ooops."

Nugak winced. Glad that's not me. He had his own piece of the puzzle to watch- whichever of the humans' fleets had decided to go pick on the Kavoolites was having the usual troubles. Lots of them.

Commodore Pdeudemar, Eoghan First Cruiser Squadron, hissed quietly as the Zebesian battlegroup made their turn and fired up their engines. One of the plasma destroyers, the one that had taken a heavy railgun strike from his cruisers, wasn't going to make it, but the other ships... that course change had turned the stealth frigates from a decisive weapon into a secondary factor, all by itself. He'd seen this coming the minute they "blind-fired" that sheaf of torpedoes towards the frigates. Someone over there had good eyes. Too good.

Also... their ships were turning, everyone but the plasma destroyers. Which was very strange; so far the other Zebesian ships seemed to have no trouble with firing their weapons in any direction they pleased. No sign of heavy axial weapons for them to throw at him, so why would they turn away from a course that gave them the quickest possible escape? Something was wrong.

The ship's neural implant network was better at conveying subconscious impressions than numbers or data- more used to set context for what to do than to tell what to do. For just over a quarter of a second, the network conveyed a quite uniform impression to all crew tapped into it.

<Uh-oh.>

The Eoghan commodore was a fast thinker; he put two and two together in the fractional second available. But there was simply no order to give, no way to anticipate what would happen or communicate it to anyone in a position to act on it. Not before the Kavoolites dropped out of Heim drive, only a few thousand kilometers astern of his trailing cruiser, and dumped a point-blank rain of disruptor bolts into the cruiser Brais. Brais, with her shields focused forward, expecting those same weapons from ahead, from the place where the enemy had been just a eyeblink ago.

The first seconds of tactical surprise had to be reconstructed afterwards; no one had a clear picture of them at the time. Most of the Eoghan crews reacted well enough, but there was no time for thought or analysis- time for nothing but automatic training and fast twitch reflexes. The cruisers' responses were diverse. Some slewed rapidly round trying to bring lightning-gun broadsides to bear; others stayed in place and let their casemates rotate onto target, or concentrated on getting a kinetic javelin mount configured to do the job. Fire control scrambled to get a lock on new targets.

Some of the mad scramble went to cross purposes- there was no time to talk, no time for helmsmen to tell gunners which way the ship was turning. Computers didn't care and took their shots as they found them; light blaster guns under central fire direction started hosing down the Zebesian attackers in short order. The Eoghan controllers on the heavy javelin and railgun mounts did care, and with seconds to react, never got the chance to get a shot off.

After dumping the on-mount capacitors for their antiship disruptors into Brais, the Kavoolite cruisers linked up with their damaged warbird cousins to finish the firing pass with another spread of torpedoes, then relit their drives and darted away and out of range.

Pdeudemar hissed again, louder. The torpedoes' accuracy didn't impress, and a lot of them detonated uselessly, at long standoff ranges where they barely scratched their targets- was something wrong with their guidance? Perhaps so, but between the deep holes left by the Zebesian beam weapons and what few of those agile little missiles had gotten on target... Brais was much, much the worse for wear. Thin sheets of venting flame showed breaches of the pressure hull, and the cruiser's acceleration was dropping fast.

"Report from comm section on Brais, sir, a beam cut through to the bridge. No word from the captain."

The commodore's eyes flashed. "Alert all ships, be prepared for all-round attack, but concentrate on the rear quarter."

The stern aspect was particularly vulnerable on a warcruiser; ahead there were heavy guns and strong point defense, on the broadsides plenty of casemates, but directly behind, nothing but the kinetic javelins and countermissile launchers could bear. The javelins were strong, but not that strong.

The intelligence officer's first squeaks came after he'd taken the initiative to bounce those pictures to Pdeudemar's screen. Pdeudemar twitched agreement; the staffer was right. He could use that, hopefully.

The commodore risked a glance at the situation ahead with the stealth ships' half-foiled ambush. His stealth frigates had started slaloming back and forth across their base course to throw lightning-gun broadsides at the distant, fleeing plasma destroyers- no hits, the range was extreme for the frigates' inaccurate weapons, and opening fast. That part of the ambush had already been defeated. The Eoghan hoped his frigates would score enough hits in time to bring one down, but he didn't expect much. Probably they'd finish off the damaged Zebesian raider with javelin fire as soon as the disappointment shook out. There was that at least.

Back to the rest of the Zebesian force- though the sheer diversity of their behavior was making Pdeudemar suspicious. The dual-drive attack ships almost had to be crewed by someone other than the common run of the mill; could there be multiple organizations at work here?

Quickly- too quickly- the enemy was making their turnaround; indecipherable scatters from communication beams suggested a round of tactical coordination. Three of Pdeudemar's skippers tried to interrupt the conversation with a salvo of railgun fire; the commodore's face twitched in amusement as the Zebesians crabbed sideways to get out of the line of fire. He could almost hear the "eek!" coming from them.

That didn't do a lot of good, though; they really were far enough out to dodge almost anything the cruisers could throw. The Zebesians finished planning, spun to bear, and blurred again. Pdeudemar felt rattling hisses scraping against his own flagship's shields- that had to be main battery beam weapons from the smaller cruiser-sized units, with some kind of low-intensity cadence effect heterodyned onto the beam to disrupt shielding. That secondary mode didn't pose much of a threat to the Eoghans' quasisolid shields in itself, but it certainly wasn't doing the generators any good to fend off a resonance attack while already struggling with the weapons' brute energy transfer.

Still, though, their disruptor fire hadn't cracked any of his command's shields yet. His own crews almost had the heavy javelins configured, it only took seconds. Pdeudemar inhaled in anticipation of the first heavy antiship bolts against their hulls... and the dual-drive ships swirled away again at twice lightspeed and rising, the echoes of their jamming fading like laughter in the ears.

Pdeudemar batted his whiskers furiously- so they wanted to play feint-feint-slash? With him cast as the lumberer beast? Infuriating and yet... interesting. He relaxed a little, trying to get in touch with his inner mongoose; instinct could serve as much as the tactical manuals sometimes, even more so against an enemy like this than against the run of the mill. What was the pattern, what were they fighting like? Strike, dart away to comfortably long range where none of his energy weapons could reply effectively, line up another run, strike again under Heim drive.

Two could play at that game, at least partly. Pdeudemar checked ranges- it'd work. "Order to the destroyers, stop frolicking. Dump your missiles on those plasma destroyers now; fire remaining aether torpedoes at enemy dual-drive ships as they come to rest after their attack runs, as targets present themselves."

He only had a few of the FTL weapons left after the failed bombardment he'd thrown at the Zebesian interdictor earlier, but whatever the politicians might chitter about expenses, those munitions existed to be used. Pdeudemar was pleased to see the destroyers go to active sensors faster than he'd hoped and- yes!- they were spinning ship and firing off-axis at the fleeing enemy ships; that would compromise accuracy a bit, but gave them better shots where it counted. Would anyone be able to line up on the Heim-jumpers?

The commodore got about what he'd expected, not what he'd hoped. Only one of the destroyers lined up a shot with confidence enough to risk an aether torpedo- aimed at one of the two light laser ships, and it seemed to be having trouble with its sublight drives. A good target. The torpedo flashed across the intervening light-seconds much as the Zebesian ships themselves had- too fast to follow over these distances- and what followed was the strangest fate the Eoghan commodore had ever seen a starship experience.

Kavoolite laser strikers were protected by crude, yet reasonably effective ellipsoidal bubble shields. Aether torpedoes impacted at impossible FTL speeds, in the midst of a collapsing Heim field; they often interacted strangely and unpredictably with shields, decaying on collision into sprays of tachyon-antitachyon pairs, sleptons and squarks. The results could be... exotic. Unusually so in this case- the laser striker's shields actually held against the impact, at least in a topological sense. Sadly, the once near-spherical shield bubble deformed under the impact, forming an ellipsoid roughly three kilometers wide and ten meters thick.

Needless to say, this did not leave much room for the ship. Deprived of its generators, the bubble shield dissolved in short order, opening up to reveal a large slab of pancaked wreckage. Pdeudemar chirruped to himself as the other dual-drive ships jetted away from their rest points. With luck that would at least slow down their next attack run a bit-

Or not. Again the lightning-quick jump to visual range of his cruisers, but the crashing rain of point blank fire didn't burn into any more of his ships. All ships' alarms squawked as disruptor bolts and torpedoes strafed their defensive screens, but there was no concentration, no easy burnthrough here, and they danced away in short order. He hadn't slowed his enemy down; he'd startled them into speeding up...

It wasn't fun and games, beings were dying, but forty million years of his mongoosoid ancestors were cheering him on as he waited for the next viperish strike. Let's see. Surprise, feint, this looked like an awkward off-balance slash, next should be another feint...

"Sir, those high-power fire control designators are picking up again, I think they're readying another missile attack on Cunedda and Iria..."

No, that couldn't be right, that would leave them naked for any of his destroyers' aether torps. "Stay poised, ready for all-round defense." Add-'javelins to the rear?' No, they'd figure that part out themselves.

He was expecting the blurring Heim-drive attack run this time, which made it a bit less startling.

Only three ships showed up this time- the large ones, astern of his command. Four ships got off Javelin shots, not bad since one of the ones that hadn't was Brais. One went wide, one fired a diffused pressor blast that barely rippled the Zebesian's shields, expecting a missile attack. Iria managed one hit and one near miss, but the shot was centered and didn't do much more than rattle the target. Carme had better luck, spearing an enemy heavy cruiser with both barrels, bashing it out of line and leaving a sparkling trail of scatter off its deforming shields. Not a penetrating hit, or much of one, but at least it meant that only two Kavoolite light warbirds were able to dump their ready magazines' antimatter torpedoes into Pdeudemar's command.

The heavier ships jumped out now, leaving the torpedoes behind to finish the job. They weren't split perfectly between the targets the disruptor cruisers' illuminator beams had picked out; the torpedoes' guidance receivers split about 70/30 in favor of Iria, and the bulk of the weapons homed in on the damaged cruiser accordingly.

Iria had already shot off her kinetic javelins in antiship mode- she couldn't recharge them in time to fire another blast to fend off the missiles. The torpedoes had been set for close proximity; Delion wanted intense hits more than he wanted numerous ones. The Eoghans' jammers counted for a good deal, and a last-ditch spray of countermissiles knocked down about a third of the incoming, but far, far too many warheads got through.

Antimatter charges lit off at ranges of little over a kilometer. Cunedda weathered the storm, though it flayed her shields and harrowed her surface mounts with deadly gamma radiation. Iria... didn't. When the static of so many radiation counts blurring his flagship's detectors passed, the warcruiser was plainly a battered wreck, even at first glance. Pdeudemar could see some of the glowing craters in the armor belt on magnification; at least one reached all the way down to the secondary armor belt over the ship's core. He doubted that ship would ever fight again.

Not a diversion. He'd miscalculated, and badly.

"Try to get in touch with someone on Iria, we'll need to take the crew off."

Pdeudemar tweaked his mental image of the alien commander: more aggressive than he'd expected, quicker and more decisive on the attack, less interested in distraction, more slash and less feint. The Eoghan couldn't blame his enemy for that- the best way to deal with dangerous opposition was always to go for the throat.

Could he use that, and properly this time? Perhaps- and instinctive sense of timing flicked the commodore's eyes to the half of the plot set to large-scale and tracking his fleet. The destroyers' plasma missiles, fired from long range, were closing on the retreating enemy spinal-beam ships at last. Those targets looked hauntingly like the recordings from Hawk's Nest- perhaps crewed by the same saurians, or a different band from the same species.

Whoever manned them was covering their escape with all the defense fire at their disposal- wide-focus blasts of neutral plasma from their casemated secondaries, long bursts from quick-fire autoguns as tertiary missile defense. But point defense didn't serve them well; the Eoghan destroyers' plasma torpedoes were light, agile, and well shielded, much like the ones the Heim-jumpers kept throwing at him. Pdeudemar spared a quick glance; the dual-drive ships were still talking, still organizing the next run...

Far off to dorsal, there were a few complicated moments as the fleeing raiders blasted the Eoghan salvo with last-ditch ECM. That did them more good- trying to see through the plasma-shielding that gave them their name put limits on the acuity and sophistication of the sublight torpedoes' seekers. The raiders' EW suite put out a deafening roar of barrage jamming, stamping out active sensor pulses by sheer short-duration volume. Stunned and confused missile guidance systems reeled, lost track momentarily- at the last moment. Much of the salvo went off target.

After that, the four lead ships fared relatively well- they took hits on their shields, but weathered the attack with modest damage- rippling signatures, and the commnet relayed some promising spectroscopic results that suggested large divots blown out of their armor belts, but none of those four lost shields or drive power to any important degree.

The fifth, the one Brais put a railgun slug into- through- in the opening phase... not so well. Her shields and drives were plainly unbalanced by the hit that had torn up so much of the ship's structure, and where the wounded raider had managed well on the helm escaping javelin fire from Pdeudemar's beam-heavy frigates, the guided weapons of his destroyers found and struck their mark far more reliably. Something was off-key about her ECM output, and that. Missile after missile struck home, battering down screens of force and flaying into the raider's hull.

Reduced to a crippled hulk, the saurian plasma destroyer wallowed- barely accelerating but still turning. Out of control, or bringing their axial main gun to bear? It wouldn't matter much either way. Pdeudemar saw the frigates' targeting plans; as he'd expected they were lining up javelin shots to finish the wreck.

Damage to four targets and a de facto kill on a fifth; not bad for the destroyers' sublight munitions, not against targets of that tonnage and competence. The destroyers celebrated their success with another aether-torp launch against the Heim-jumping main body. Three shots this time, and Pdeudemar realized with a glance at the plot that that was half the shots his destroyer squadron had left.

The dual-drive ships' point defense was practically useless against the FTL weapons, but ECM could and did baffle them. Two torpedoes missed entirely; the third speared the Kavoolite ship Visen. The disruptor cruiser, made of sterner stuff than the laser ship hit on the last launch, rode out the strike better- she was merely wrecked beyond hope of repair, not obliterated.

Pdeudemar saw the light cruiser's image clouded by a spread of debris and escape pods. "Signal the destroyers, good shooting." Two hits of four launched- good under difficult combat conditions, if not ideal... Then the commodore hissed in alarm, snout quivering in reflex as he realized what the shift among the Heim-jumpers' formation meant. Alarm flashed across the ship's neural net, radiating from Pdeudemar towards his signals section.

<Destroyers starburst!>

The mongoosoids in charge of the flagship's communications got the message faster than they could have parsed speech- a second or two shaved off response time, and in the event it made a difference. The Eoghan destroyers had already laid off the cheering to break away from their base course. Those extra seconds' warning bought them precious kilometers, a gain of distance that built steadily as four Heim-drive ships came about and blurred. This time, the streak on the displays shot across the line of sight of Pdeudemar's warcruisers, rather than directly towards or away. The ships' sensor images split as subspace detectors tracked the motion in real, fractional-second time while lightspeed sensors reeled in confusion.

The surviving Kavoolite disruptor cruisers dropped out of Heim drive, wonderfully placed for an alpha strike with their main antiship beams, against ships poorly prepared to deal with such fire... and which happened to be some hundreds of kilometers and a radian's worth of arc away from where they were supposed to be. The Imperials tracked beams across the sky, walked them onto the targets, but the devastating initial slash was blunted.

Two cruisers tracked their beams onto the Eoghan missile destroyer Cloch-Sneachta. A third added her fire a few seconds later, and through some trick of tuning they managed to accomplish something useful with the cadence effect heterodyned on their weapons. The light ship's defensive panels flashed, rippled, attenuated, and evanesced, leaving bare metal to be carved up by the heavy energy weapons at point blank.

The Kavoolites cut deep, then swung onto a second target- the destroyer Saighead. This ship, already farther away, took the brunt of the attack better. The disruptor beams were just starting to leak power through the destroyer's shields when the first volley of guided railgun rounds from the cruisers arrived. They kept firing after that, but a few near misses from anticapital impactors shook them enough to get them turning, still blazing away from their weapon banks at Saighead until the last moments of blurring FTL jump.

"Saighead reports fifty percent power output and holding steady, Cloch-Sneachta reports severe damage, shield generators overloaded and blew out. Her aetherics are down. The squadron is down to one torpedo, one of Iomhair's, sir."

"Tell them to save it for later, then."

Ambush-slash, feint, interrupted slash, jump to a new threat and hamstring it, then... What would the Zebesians do next? Jump back to hit another of his crippled ships? Probably; those plasma destroyers were getting close to the limit, and it staggered belief that the Zebesians would keep risking close passes against his command like this once their ships without Heim drives were clear. They'd done well against Pdeudemar so far, but the Eoghan had no intention of letting that last.

Finishing off a cripple would be appealing if he were in charge over there. Iria or Brais. Pdeudemar paused and tapped his nose in irritation. He didn't like overriding his captains like this. If the next attack took the shape he expected, he needed them pointed on now. That meant dragging individual ships to bear where he needed them, coordination at the expense of initiative... distasteful, but there was nothing for it.

"They're spotlighting our ships again, sir."

"Which ones?"

"All of them."

No clues about which targets he'd need to protect from that. He'd have to go by hunter's instinct.

"Anxo, set javelins to cover vector two hundred by minus thirty. Carme..."

Pdeudemar finished his orders, in full and unaccustomed detail. With the javelins locked on, there was nothing for it but to wait for the next pounce- and hope no gods meddled, hope he'd figured the angles right. The eight remaining Zebesians spun about- only three blurred towards his warcruisers. Another torpedo attack, then.

Pdeudemar had five cruisers left in something like shape to fight, with nine javelin mounts still working between them. Four to cover the patch of space directly behind Iria's aft quarter where they'd appear if he was right, three covering Brais where they might take a shot if he was almost-right, and two in reserve.

The commodore was as correct in his estimate of the unknown alien commander as he'd hoped. The first warbird, the former flagship Ravadrex, took after Cunedda- damaged twice in earlier actions, and ripe for a follow-up to wreck her entirely- not what he'd expected but not out of line. The other two of the Kavoolite ships jumped for Iria to make sure of her with another spread of torpedoes... just as planned.

Anxo, Pdeudemar's flagship, did her best to drive off the pounce on Cunedda, opening up with a spray of lightning-gun fire. They scored some hits, missed some opportunities to surprise and unexpected tricks of the Imperial Navy's jamming and deception. Honors were about even; Ravadrex took a few penetrating hits in exchange for a few hits of her own on the the damaged warcruiser, but most of the damage on both sides was done to the crews' shields and nerves.

Meanwhile, the bulk of the Fourth Cruiser Squadron's heavy antiship javelins went in against the pair that had jumped for Iria. Six shots in the first salvo. One ship's helmsman must have been paranoid or prescient; immediately after emergence he twisted away in a move that would have done credit to a fast frigate. That evasive burn let him outguess a bolt from Antía and turned a centered punch from Cunedda into a graze. Grazes from javelin fire carried little energy and a great deal of torque; the warbird spun out of control, shield generators wrenched but more or less holding- fast action saved the ship, but the spread of torpedoes her captain had meant to fire wound up spraying across half the sky. The handful of photon missiles that locked on their intended target died to point defense from Antía before getting within a hundred kilometers.

The Kavoolite captain, cut from the same cloth as his helmsman, engaged the Heim Drive and took his ship out of there before the Eoghans could get any funny ideas about follow-up shots.

The third warbird, Kenek, was less lucky- no initial evasive jump, and three kinetic bolts speared her within a few seconds of emergence; her shields blazed white and died under the load, and a ripple of fire from Carme's port casemates burned a deep canyon along the warbird's hull. That put paid to her torpedo launch- and more to the point, took a mobility-killing bite out of her Heim coils.

Kenek kept firing as a matter of course- disruptors on backup power trunks where the main grid had been cut, and the phaser banks could ignore anything but a direct hit as long as the battery rooms held out. Central fire direction was out of the loop, and it showed from the sudden switch of targets. Despite that, the local-control gunners picked the right target, in theory. They concentrated on Brais, hoping to turn that ship's damage into constructive total loss and force the invaders to trade a cruiser for a cruiser. Their disruptors burned down into Brais's dorsal surface, chewing up countermissiles and turret blasters, disintegrating patches of armor and eating towards the Black Box arrays that supplied a healthy dose perpetual motion to the forward axial mass drivers.

Another volley of javelin strikes landed on Kenek's naked hull. The hull, braced by power-fields, didn't tear; the Eoghans didn't know enough about Kavoolite naval architecture to snap them with component shots. But then, with the brute force of four warcruisers' primary antiship armament brought to bear on a lone cripple that matched any one of them in tonnage but none of them in power output and technical sophistication, they didn't have to.

The next minute of Fourth Cruisers' fire melted, crushed, or sheared off something like ten percent of their target's mass. Shock waves cracked and buckled much of what remained.

Pdeudemar winced at the sight- at this range, literally sight; there was an image of the target displayed on optical magnification for purposes of his display. He wasn't a machine, and seeing a ship spring that many atmosphere leaks and vent that much plasma and vapor made him think all too clearly of what it would be like if the same were happening to him. The raider's drive signature had already collapsed, and as to power generation- something disturbingly like a quantum black hole had just ripped out through the target's ventral hull surface on a beeline for interstellar space. He hadn't done that, was it some kind of horrible equipment malfunction?

Fortunately for the survivors aboard Kenek, Pdeudemar didn't interpret the scram-shutdown procedure for a cavitronic reactor as an attack- as well he might have, if one of his cruisers had been near the singularity's line of flight. Instead, he gave a rather merciful order.

Pdeudemar's intuition paid off; the last bursts of desultory phaser fire died away in seconds, followed by a stuttering omnidirectional radio broadcast in Galstandard English from one of the warbird's few remaining antennae: "Surrender... request terms... no further resistance... medic-"

The radio signal cut off. That was a target thoroughly down, and if the Zebesians really intended to run for it at all, the Eoghan doubted he'd get time to kill a second. The surviving plasma destroyers, having outrun his pursuit, would be jumping out any moment; Pdeudemar had a feeling the dual-drive ships would run with them.

It'd been a difficult action. Pdeudemar fondly imagined his enemies had found it so too.

Glow-Ball Information Systems, Nova MiratiaAs news of the Nova Atlantean debacle is disseminated to the citizenry, questions have been raised as to the wisdom of our long-standing policy of harbouring Tau refugees. Across the Union, the descendants of Tau refugees are almost universally unimpressed by the actions of their Nova Atlantean brethren, being far too busy working, partying, drinking, and partaking of hallucinogenic drugs to give a shit about what caste they were fucking last night, much less who's in charge.

A former Ethereal caste member (now an honoured member of his Urbanate's Audio Entertainment Unit) had this to say on the matter; "The actions of the totalitarian Tau of Nova Atlantis is blah blah blah terrible doubleplusungood etcetera. So on and so forth. Kiss my powdered blue ass. Go drink, fuck, be merry and productive. Thank you."

The former Ethereal caste member then excused himself, ostensibly for a blunt, and was thereafter unavailable for comment.

Ayn Alhelway Station was formerly an abandoned trading outpost, until the devastation of Aray saw thousands of refugees taking shelter in its derelict confines. Initially dilapidated and barely habitable, the Red Crescent organization saw to the provision of basic necessities to Ayn Alhelway. In their graciousness, they also declared Ayn Alhelway to be a open station, a safe haven for all beings of all walks of life to take shelter in.

Unfortunately, their naiveté was rewarded by the arrival of those who would abuse their kindnesses. Man-Tau, from a myriad number of worlds, fleeing Byzantine Orthodox persecution and Karlack splinter strains, graced Ayn Alhelway with their presence and the Red Crescent could not deny sanctuary to their blue-skinned kind, for to do so would be un-Islamic. The Man-Tau were persecuted refugees, just like all those they sheltered. But they did not know that the persecutions the Man-Tau underwent were done with good reason.

These Man-Tau were amongst the strange ones. They were the ones who were, with frighteningly unnatural speed, able to organize a resistance capable of systematically processing the Byzantine fanatics in their homeland. They were the ones who swiftly, upon mutation, segregate themselves into castes as though driven by an instinctual urge. Mayhaps it was just a fluke, an occurrence of chance that made them so efficient and so much like the true Tau of old... or perhaps it was something else, something far more sinister.

These Man-Tau had been driven off their world by a combination of Karlack splinter strains from Aray, and a force of Orthodox fanatics that had somehow organized themselves into a ragtag fleet. Perhaps due to offerings of both material and supernatural rewards by their patriarchs. The Nova-Atlanteans' abandonment of the Man-Tau, and the subsequent cessation of nano-bioweapon shipments, dealt a grave blow to the Man-Tau Enclave, forcing them to flee to space - to Ayn Alhelway.

But they had no intention of relegating themselves to mere refugees. No. They were now compelled by a higher power to enact change, against not just the fanatic Orthodoxes who hounded them across the cosmos, but on a far greater interstellar scale. They would bring forth... the Greater Good.

Despite their lack of Atlantean nanophages, the Man-Tau were able to fabricate concoctions extracted from their own highly contagious bodily fluids, in a ritualistic process wherein a worthy Fire Caste warrior gave a sample of his own tissues to be made into more mutagens that would baptize the gue’la and remake them into Tau. This symbolic sacrifice of flesh in order to transmogrify a human into a Tau was essential for any aspiring Firewarrior to prove the purity of his blue flesh.

So it was that with these instruments of the Greater Good that, under the auspices of the Caste Ethereal, did they taint the huddling refugee masses of Ayn Alhelway with their virulent bodily fluids - spread out in droplet and aerosol medium - and thus replenish their ranks with a new generation of mutated Man-Tau. They made the refugees feel their disease.

Thus, when the Orthodox zealots came in their ships, after chasing their quarry across the nine vectors, and docked upon the module of Ayn Alhelway, they fully expected to find only a few mutated Man-Tau, stragglers to be put to the flame. They hoped to have many a Saracen and heathen as an audience, to watch the fate of the mutant and thus cast off their false faiths to accept the God-Emperor as their true Lord and Master. Instead, their glourious arival was greeted by an entire module filled with degenerate Indigo abominations. Thousands of refugees had been mutated by the Man-Tau, as per the dictates of their Caste Ethereal, and as they did not use the refined Nova-Atlantean nanophages but instead used crude bioweapons based on the pathogens infecting their own desecrated viscera, the grotesque mutations had evolved in ways unforeseen by their original creators. The result was an even more hideous mockery than the previous generation of mutants, far hideouser, for in their mutative degeneration the infectees’ very brains had been curdled, reducing them to indigo-mongoloid intellects that followed the words and pheromones of the ruling elite without hesitation

The neo-Ethereals beheld this and declared it to be good and great.

The Orthodox crusaders saw this and decided to kill them all.

The fanatic zealots charged into the teeming masses of purple filth with their blades and weapons ablaze, spilling tainted blood on the decks by the gallons. The degenerate Man-Tau mutants babbled inarticulate cries in a linguistic butchery of the old Tau languages of old, and at the command of their Ethereal master, they threw themselves into the fray in an attempt to drown the zealots in bodies and bodily fluids. The few first-generation Fire Caste warriors stood behind this mentally enfeebled horde and sniped the Orthodox crusaders from afar, while their degenerate Man-Tau clawed at face masks and sought to puncture sealed suits, trying to infect their attackers and turn them into more mutants. Yet the crusaders fought valiantly, killing dozens of the shambling indigo infected for every one of their own felled or, worse yet, contaminated and turned. But the numbers were against them, they had confidently strode into Ayn Alhelway expecting minimal resistance, not an entire refuge camp of the damned. A few hundred fanatic faithful, versus thousands of slobbering mutants. The numbers said it all. But the Orthodox zealots’ fighting spirits were not daunted by mere details like ‘overwhelming numbers’, or blasphemous terms like ‘outmaneuvered and cut off from escape’, they fought on and continued on stabbing Man-Tau in the face or shooting them in their gonads to prevent any of the pseudo-xenos filth from laying more eggs to perpetuate their diseased ilk. It was their duty to the God-Emperor to rid the rightfully human universe of as many of the abominations as possible, and if they were to die along with the beasts, then the God-Emperor willed it, and they would take as many of the animals with them to win the favor of Him of Terra and assure their path to Heaven.

Yet not all of those in Ayn Alhelway were fanatic or mutant. The remaining Red Crescent aid workers on the space station, not knowing what else to do, locked themselves in the module furthest away from the carnage. They brought what remaining survivors there were, mostly women and children. Most of the men, refugees of the sectarian conflicts in the region, had sought to defend their new home from the transgressions of the horrific Man-Tau mutants and the hated Orthodox fanatics. In their attempt at repulsing the invaders, they were all cut down or infected before being cut down afterwards.

The weeping survivors sealed themselves and, in a forlorn hope, transmitted a distress signal - not knowing who in these lawless regions ruled by anarchy and piracy would come to their aid.

But then, a new hope came. It was their last, best hope for peace.

The Bragulan paleocruiser Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling had arrived. And on all communications channels, and even in audible air for the paleocruiser’s atomic fields had been set to vibrate the very atmosphere within the space station, a single voice could be heard. A single voice representing the Imperator of the Bragulan Star Empire. Darvyl Sagatantron Byzon.

“This is the voice of Brag control. We bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours: Obey us and live, or disobey and die.”

Captain Dymytry Zyvyannov growled. His command was assigned to patrolling the worthless Imperator-forsaken worlds of the former Outlands along with a few other paleocruisers and some gunskimmers, their sphere of responsibility was in BB-25 while the rest of Kosmoflott Oktyabrsky was assigned to lock down sector AA-24, in preparation for the glourious battle to be had there against the age old foe. Zyvyannov chafed at the fact that he and his venerable paleoship was not allowed to partake in that honor, but he also accepted certain realities, such as the fact that his fossil ship was no longer a top-of-the-line warship and that it was more suitable for patrolling the wastes of the former Outlands. That he had been given a respectable rank amongst the ad hoc peacekeeping task force, for Command had acknowledged his law enforcement experience in the Imperial Bragulan Life and Death Arbitrators, the Suicide Police, and sought his counsel in policing this unruly region of space, was recognition enough. He would not fail his superiors, for to fail them was to fail the Imperator himself.

Dymytry depressed the handset of his radio, and waited for the response of the transgressors.

It did not take long for them to reply. As he suspected, humans were clearly to blame for this catastrophe. The first responder spoke in Low Gothic, which Dymytry was much familiar with, for it was the barbarian tongue of the hated Byzantinians.

“Bragulans?! Our Patriarch has declared you to be pets of the faithful, leashed by the God-Emperor’s shackles to subservience under His Will. You will destroy these Tau mongrels at once and perhaps we will reward you by not wearing your relatives for fur coats!”

Whoever this puny human was, he clearly did not hear of what happened to the last human who said something just like that. Dymytry snorted his snout and prepared to issue orders to vaporize the entire space station with all hands on board, when suddenly another transmission came from somewhere else inside the modules.

Not again. Dymytry cursed under his breath. He remembered how he had dealt with another confusing case of crazy cro-magnons, when that humanoid robotoid in that Heffalump ship was attacked by pirates who then had the nerve to commit the illegal crime of suicide in Bragulan space.

At least, in this case, there was less ambiguity since apparently both parties were puny little human troublemakers in need of a few megatons worth of stickbeating. At least, this time, he would finally get to use some of his missiles. He had clear orders from Bragulan high command to settle disputes and problems as quickly and as expediently as possible, in order to keep the peace. The Imperial Bragulan Navy didn’t have much experience with the concept of ‘peacekeeping’, which was why he was in a unique position to make judgment calls, as he was both a navy officer and a law enforcer. This was the reason why had been chosen for this assignment.

He took one more look at his mandate, printed in bragpaper.

Code:

Peacekeeping elements of KOSMOFLOTT OKTYABRSKY are to facilitate the timely stabilization of space sector BB-25 as quickly and effectively as possible. The pacification of the sector is crucial for the success of operations in the adjacent sector AA-24, where the combat elements of OKTYABRSKY are due to undertake the complete liquidation of enemy forces with maximum prejudice.

Dymytry decided. He would solve this problem in the best way he knew how.

“Load missile tubes 43 to 48!” he bellowed. Then, he switched his radio handset on. “Puny humans of space station... Ayn Alhelway. For breaking the peace, inciting violence, and insulting Bragulanity, you are hereby sentence to complete destruction. Prepare to die. That is all. Thank you.”

Transmissions of protest came from the station.

“You filthy animals! The pets of the God-Emperor cannot bite the hand that feeds them! This is betrayal most foul! I, a faithful servant of the Emperor, hereby command you to kill yourselves! Roll over and play dead you dumb bears!”

That, on the other hand, was. Dymytry couldn’t understand a single bit of it, except for the last part, but he didn’t really care.

“Ready to fire on my mark,” he growled. He had enough of these monkeyshines. These humans were about to get really shiny soon enough, anyway. The well polished boot of Bragulan law was about to stomp on their faces. “It’s time for some good old fashioned police brutality. Mar-”

His command to fire was cut off by another transmission, from a third source!

“Please! This is Red Crescent outpost Ayn Alhelway. Our refugee station has been taken over by Tau-infected extremists and Byzantine fanatics, they’re killing each other on the main module but we’ve isolated ourselves from them. We have women and children on board! Don’t fire! Please, don’t fire!”

Hmmm... Dymytry wondered. On one hand, a collection of mutant Indigo-humans and crazed Byzantines. On the other, defenseless females and cubs. They were all probably humans too. It was a difficult choice.

“Belay my last order,” Dymytry waved dismissively to his adjutant. Then, he turned on his radio again. “Tell me, human, why I shouldn’t atomize you for... harboring space criminals guilty of inciting violence?”

“Because we’re not harboring them! The mutants used some kind of bioweapon, they mutated the refugees into Tau, and then the fanatics came and they all started killing everyone! We’ve broken no law, we’re the victims here. Please, help us!”

Help? That was a strange concept for Dymytry. But she made a good case. He had heard reports of those Nova Atlantean nanoweapons, the standing orders were to eradicate all traces of such dangerous contagions wherever they were found. Yet, Dymytry remembered his time in the Arbitrators, before he specialized as a Suicide Police officer, back when he was merely persecuting sense offenders. There was a provision in the law, which stated that some animals and vermin had to be tested, to find out about any epidemics in the Nether. These human females and cubs could be like that, they could be recovered and processed for informations, especially regarding these pesky mutated Indigo-humans who were bothering this region of space. The Fleet knew so little about them, and they might become a hindrance to the occupation peacekeeping mission. Any good law enforcer knew the value of interrogating witnesses.

“Very well, puny human females and cubs,” Dymytry announced over the intercoms. “It is my judgment, as captain of the the glouriously stupendous and gerontologically disgruntled paleocruiser Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling, that only some of you will die today! You... Byzantines and Indigos - ”

“You will pay for this, bear! Emperor on Terra, pets can’t do this! They can’t! This is so not happening!”

“DO NOT INTERRUPT ME!” Dymytry roared. His raised voice was corresponded by a spike in the radiations emitted by the paleocruiser’s gamma ray communications antennae. Inside the space station, dozens of mutants and fanatics were microwaved and exploded like human-sized zits. “Prepare for summary combustion by atomization for the crime of nonsense offense!”

He turned to the subspace sonar sensors officer bear, who was busy tuning into the transmissions by both the mutants and the fanatics, trying to localize them.

The officer was a young bear, practically a cub, but he had graduated from the academy with honors and was undeniably skilled with his subspace sonar sensors suite. The Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling’s subspace sonars were quite old by galactic standards, its last upgrade was during its midlife refit, and midlife for this paleocruiser was three centuries ago. Still, despite whatever shortcomings fossilized bragtech may have had, the crews were able to optimize their system by doing many unauthorized tweakings and modifications - sometime even installing alien hardware into the rig. Captain Dymytry often overlooked these things, as long as the crew and the modifications they made were still capable of doing their job - and as he had no formal naval training, being sidewaysmoted into command by acquiring the paleocruiser due to its captain’s not-really-suicide, he had to rely on their judgment to keep the ship afloat and tried to ignore it whenever he caught the crews watching whatever ideologically impure transmissions they had intercepted off human space.

The old ship still had it in it her and could burn through even immodest jamming through sheer atomic power. Tracing unencrypted transmissions in an unshielded, undefended space station was cubsplay even for the myopic and half-blind stroke-survivor ship.

“Captain, I localized their transmissions. Feeding coordinates to the missiles,” the young officer pulled out several floppy disks, placed them into a cylinder and sent them into a pneumatic tube that went straight to the ship’s weapons magazine, where the missileers would proceed to manually feed the floppy disks into each missile. After a few minutes, the process was done. “Missiles are ready, sir.”

“Good. Launch... now.”

The missile salvo tore through the module containing the warring mutants and fanatics. The unarmored hull of the space station was ripped to pieces as missiles punched into them and initiated in omnidirectional multi-megaton blasts. Even the ships that brought the mutants and the fanatics were not exempt from this. They weren’t even proper warship, and against even a centuries-old Bragulan cruiser they were easily gutted. After the brief but violent missile massacre subsided, what remained of Ayn Alhelway floated serenely, mostly intact save for a couple of its modules, which were now a debris field scattering away at all directions.

The survivors that remained on the intact modules were quickly gathered into the paleocruiser.

shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZookShroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medicPink Sugar Heart Attack!

"It is clear what the Empire's intentions are: to illegally and immorally enslave sentient beings of Esper potential to perform what are likely to be dangerous and cruel experiments upon. This behavior is unacceptable to any civilized being, and will not stand. Thus the coalition, involving the Shinra Republic, United Star Kingdom of New Anglia, the Technocracy of Umeria, the Clans of Hiigara, the Interstellar Union of Worlds, the Holy Empire of Haruhi Suzumiya, the Byzantine Imperium, the Sultanate of Klavostan, and Tianguo, present the following demands to the Multiversal Empire of Happiness:

"A full and complete military stand down, and surrender of all equipment to the coalition,Full and complete access to all Imperial facilities by coalition personnel,And the surrender of any and all beings engaged in or who authorized the experimentation of enslaved Espers to coalition authority.

"If these demands are not met by 00:00 on the first of June in the Year 3401, United Nations of Earth and Nova Terra Standard Time, a state of war shall exist between the Coalition and the Multiversal Empire of Happiness."

"There you have it, folks, word from the Big S himself, and by that I don't mean some cape-wearing alien with a weakness for vegemite. I mean El Jefe, Presidente Cid Shinra, El Commande Giganto's own words threatening war with the bloaters! Finally, everyone's had it with them. They arrive on our galaxy unannounced, squat all over planets that weren't theirs to begin with, fill our hyperwaves with caca and transmit blathering nonsense about their 'superior' crap. But now, the President of Shinra himself has taken it up to announce that this galaxy has one rule all powers have to abide by. And that rule is: 'No Fatties'.

"Some lying lily-livered liberals are wondering if this is justified. If all this talk about preemptive strike is legal. Well, let me say one thing. Yes, it is justified! Of course it is! Here's a nation of disgusting fatties, they plop in on our galaxy, sit their wide asses on some tiny chair and break it, and they don't say anything not like those cute little Refuge birdies. All they do is play with themselves. Except when they aren't transmitting messages asking us to send espers over to them for experimentation. Jenova tittyfucking Cloud, what the hell is that? You liberals are all about esper rights, you are all about that stuff, anti mutant registration bill and everything. And now these fatsos come here and they probably want to eat our psykers, and yer all as quiet as a bunch of frightened trees.

"Know what? You should have a can of Umerthirst or something. Moisten your lips with some Lifestream. Have a can of Materia. Yeah, that's the stuff. Bunch of slack-jawed flaggoffs, this stuff will make you an Emperor-damned sexual Thanasaurus. Just like me. Oh yeah... so anyway I'd be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda' kissing your neck from behind...and then I would take the other hand with the falafel thing and I'd just put it on your dick but you'd have to do it really light, just kind of a tease business...

"Oh wait. Crap. Where was I? Oh shit. Shit! Fuck!

"Uhh... anyway, like I said, go buy some Umerthirst. Yes. Because, uh, it's not like I'm a shareholder or anything like that. No way. Uhh... fuck. Cut to commercials, goddamn it!"

Result:The galactic media reacts to Shinra's announcement.

shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZookShroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medicPink Sugar Heart Attack!

The vulture had come to Eretz-Nod before the invasion, back in the good old times when Byzantines, Centralists, Communards, and inhumanists alike were all busy fighting amongst themselves and each other in a truly disgusting squabble over who would get the largest piece of the vegemite pie. It was the perfect opportunity, unlike the other wasted worlds in the former Outlands, Nod was full of resources and there were countless factions vying for them. Which meant that it was the ideal market, there was no shortage of customers, no shortage of demand, and they could pay in precious grade-A rubiconium just to get the weapons they needed to kill each other. The vulture’s brother bears saw the opportunity too, and so they granted vulture permission to haul a true motherload of munitions to Eretz-Nod. This time, though, as to not arouse political suspicion, they chose not to dispense surplus Bragtech weaponries. Instead, vulture’s bear suppliers brought in bulk the surplus weaponries of another nation with an army almost as large as that of Bragule’s. Weaponries from the Technocracy of Umeria.

Business had been booming, literally. The various factions would sent their harvesters to gather rubiconium, return them to the refinery and prepare them for transport, and when he got the payment vulture would then allow them to requisition their weapons. He had it all. Everything from surplus Umerian ray pistols and smart grenades, to large battle tanks, even the Mammoth. This was the biggest venture vulture had undertaken and he was dead set on retiring for the quiet life after this job.

But then, the Scron came. They arrived just when the Centralist government’s direct intervention forces were on the verge of overthrowing their Communard nationalistic opponent’s defenses. The Scron changed the game drastically, adding a new player to the map. Their attacks were rapid, rushing the unaware Centralists and Communards before they could even build up their bases, and both factions lost units at an alarming rate. The Scron sent skirmishers to harass the harvesters, denying them resources, and without any rubiconium in the refineries how could they hope to purchase new units?

Vulture was already flapping his wings and preparing fly away, cutting his losses before his losses ended up cutting him. But then the damned Scron put up a blockade around orbit. There was no escape. So he hid in a Communard nationalist outpost depot.

It was a paltry base, guarded by only guerrilla infantry, light artillery and tick tanks. But to the vulture’s surprise, he found the base’s inhabitants to be an eclectic mix of both Communard and Centralist, guerrillas and regulars. They were stragglers, survivors from the Scron attacks now taking shelter in one of the few remaining rebel hideouts. They had banded together in a last ditch attempt at fighting off the alien invaders, putting aside all their previous differences for the one thing they agreed on: survival. That was the only rule in the battlefield.

Vulture met with their commanding officers. One was a grizzled veteran of the Centralist general division infantry, while the other was a Communard rebel leader.

Despite their differences, despite looking like they didn’t belong to the situation, or even the planet, they were ready to wage a war of resistance against the Scron invaders.

“These are the rules. Everybody fights, nobody quits. If you don't do your job I'll kill you myself,” the Centralite commander said. He had seen many battles, most recently in the outlying Araynan sectors, where he fought against the Karlack arachnidlisks. “What’s the matter, you want to live forever?”

“We have to get out of this island!” the Communard countered. He was right, the island they were on was isolated, they had minimal supplies, and if the Scron attacked them there all hope would be Lost. “If the Scron attack us here, all hope will be Lost!”

Vulture knew there was no way off the planet without defeating the Scron. He couldn’t count on the Bragulans to save him, not this time. He looked at his customers and knew what he had to do.

The lord of war was going to have a last minute firesale. Everything, guns, grenades, missile launchers, vehicles, armor and artillery, at discount prices. He almost wept as he sold his inventory of Mammoths for several mere truckloads of rubiconium. There were only few functional refineries left, and they had to raid the silos to make their payments. But they got their materiel and were quickly able to build up a credible military force.

They began raiding some of the outlying Scron forces, stealing the rubiconium the aliens had, in turn, stole from them earlier. They also salvaged whatever alien technology they could and bartered it for even better weapons. Soon, a sizable number of their resistance forces were outfitted with surplus Umerian wargear that were nonetheless effective. Infantry were armed with ray guns, ticktanks were traded for medium tanks - affectionately called ‘tankskis’ by the Bragulan middlemen who obtained them from Umeria. Eventually, the vulture grew out of his hesitance to sell his items for cut down prices. The only item he was slightly reluctant to sell were the damned Umerian ‘smart’ grenades, not knowing what to make of them, and knowing only two things about them: That the design was created by the legendary Umerian scientist Dr. Ulrich von Murderstein ...and that his Bragulan contact described them as "politically unreliable hand grenades." Whatever that meant.

Still, while he was more familiar with Bragtech weaponries and unaccustomed to the tech the Umerian Redshirts used, money was money and despite their lowered prices, he was still in business - which was more than he could say if the Scron had their way with Eretz-Nod.

shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZookShroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medicPink Sugar Heart Attack!

Joined: 2006-08-18 11:27pmPosts: 1476Location: COOBIE YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS

RADIO COSMOS Presents:DJ VESPER'S HOUSE OF SOUND

DJ Vesper in the studio with some delicious cake and ice cream

"And welcome back! For those of y'all who just tuned in, this is DJ Vesper's House of Sound starring yours truly, the lovely DJ Vesper, coming to you LIVE from the heart of Imperial Center! Before I get back to our regularly scheduled programming, I'd like to take a little time to address Comrade Falafel Phil's latest semi-coherent outburst on live TV..."

"Some lying lily-livered liberals are wondering if this is justified. If all this talk about preemptive strike is legal. Well, let me say one thing. Yes, it is justified! Of course it is! Here's a nation of disgusting fatties, they plop in on our galaxy, sit their wide asses on some tiny chair and break it, and they don't say anything not like those cute little Refuge birdies. All they do is play with themselves. Except when they aren't transmitting messages asking us to send espers over to them for experimentation. Jenova tittyfucking Cloud, what the hell is that? You liberals are all about esper rights, you are all about that stuff, anti mutant registration bill and everything. And now these fatsos come here and they probably want to eat our psykers, and yer all as quiet as a bunch of frightened trees.

"Know what? You should have a can of Umerthirst or something. Moisten your lips with some Lifestream. Have a can of Materia. Yeah, that's the stuff. Bunch of slack-jawed flaggoffs, this stuff will make you an Emperor-damned sexual Thanasaurus. Just like me. Oh yeah... so anyway I'd be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda' kissing your neck from behind...and then I would take the other hand with the falafel thing and I'd just put it on your dick but you'd have to do it really light, just kind of a tease business...

"Oh wait. Crap. Where was I? Oh shit. Shit! Fuck!

"Uhh... anyway, like I said, go buy some Umerthirst. Yes. Because, uh, it's not like I'm a shareholder or anything like that. No way. Uhh... fuck. Cut to commercials, goddamn it!"

"You know, Falafel Phil, it's really a bad idea to antagonize your own damn allies on the brink of such a large war as this. We Haruhiists are about as liberal as they come without being one of those stuck-up Commune twats, and OF COURSE we believe that this preemptive strike is perfectly justifiable! Fucking FATTIES, waltzing into our galaxy, stealing our planets and our food, prattling on and on about how superior and HAPPY they are while simultaneously calling on US to feed OUR psykers to them! Yeah, MAYBE you forgot that the Holy Empire is perhaps the largest psyker state apart from the Centrality and the Imperium! MAYBE you weren't paying attention when Empress Haruhi issued MULTIPLE public condemnations of the fatties' actions ever since they were exposed for the gluttonous bastards that they are! MAYBE you weren't paying attention to our own pundits repeatedly calling for war with the fatties! Yeah, way to live up to your name there, Phil O'LIEly! We all know that reality has a liberal bias, so why not reject it and substitute it with one of your own? Fuck the fatties, and fuck you, O'Liely!

"As for that last part, yeah. In the words of the esteemed Yoko Hikasa, 'NO, Thank You!' I sure as hell don't want to know what you do with falafel and transsexual hookers in your spare time, and I'm pretty damn sure your viewers don't either. Going back to what I said earlier, I got a suggestion for you, O'Liely: GO FUCK ONE OF THOSE DAMN FATTIES! Maybe your falafel-related foreplay will go over better with them!

"Now that I've said my piece, I'd just like to say good luck to our brave men and women in the SOS Imperial Armed Forces, and good luck to the brave men and women in the other coalition militaries. This one's for you. This is DJ Vesper's House of Sound, replaying, remixing, and mashing up all the classics. Stay tuned after this; we got Kalafina, Yoko Hikasa, fripSide, Shoko Nakagawa, and more!"

I ship Eino Ilmari Juutilainen x Lydia V. Litvyak.

Phantasee: Don't be a dick.Stofsk: What are you, his mother?The Yosemite Bear: Obviously, which means that he's grounded, and that she needs to go back to sucking Mr. Coffee's cock.

"d-did... did this thread just turn into Thanas/PeZook slash fiction?" - Ilya Muromets

It has come to my attention that a certain cutter had been given the name Srdjan Karic, and that this ship was chosen to be the Dictator's personal ship in his recently canceled tour. Who in Dovan's name thought it was a good idea to name a kriffing cutter after an infamous man? I would rather give that name to a dreadnought for kriff's sake. Therefore, you have one week to rename that cutter, or I will have the CSB send you to a safehouse to see the SWHS for an entire month. That is all.

"Nation, I must respond to allegations brought up by a bunch of yokels who've dared challenge the Straight Talk Express. A caller called me the other night, saying:

Shinn Langley Soryu wrote:

Does Falafel Phil actually have something to say in his defense, or did DJ Vesper actually succeed in making him shut up for the time being?

"And, well, I had no idea what a DJ Vesper was so I decided to look it up and lo and behold, I start hearing someone speaking in some strange foreign language - which I can't understand, since Shinran is the official language of this great country - and at first I thought those words were coming from darned Japanistanis, like those hundreds-years-old ones hiding in some Feelipeeni jungle, who didn't know Space War 2 was all over. It got my blood boilin', since I'm a proud Messamerican, patriotic, and even though it's been almost a thousand and five hundred years, I can't forgive those Japanistanis for what they did in the war. I even thought it was good when those tidal waves swept those nuclear plants of theirs into a volcano. They had it coming!

"But when I opened my eyes, it wasn't some crazy Imperial Japanistani Army colonel babbling at me and telling me to go take a hike at Baata'aan or something. It was actually this beautiful little pink haired girl with some cake and some chopsticks, which was sooo cute since real men eat with real utensils like knives and forks, and seeing those little chopsticks... awww. But anyway. She was still speaking in nonsense! But man, I would've brought her with me to the shower for some... falafeling, if you catch my drift. But too bad I'm already married. See?

"That's us, on our wedding day. I love my wife so much that after the artificial insemination, I offered to carry the gestating baby in my abdomen kind of like a male seahorse. Cause I'm awesome like that. So yeah, as much as I wanted to, I couldn't do any falafeling with that funny pink haired Langley girl, on account of my wife. May the Lifestream rest her soul.

"So, even though she was obviously interested, I'm sorry babe, I can't. But anyway, I guess she was also praising our military boys and expressing her admiration for them. Our soldiers, with their wavy blonde and white hair, are even prettier than those animus in Haruhii-land and the way our troops wave around their ridiculously huge swordguns while riding enormous motorcycles, it must've been stunning for DJ Vesper. I know, I get a hard on just thinking about our troops swimming in Materia.

"Anyway, all I got to say, ladies and gentlemen, is that I thank DJ Vesper and her show for standing side by side with the Falafel Factor in showing support for our troops! Our brave boys and girls! Our veterans! And our pre-emptive strike! The Haruhiists may be a bunch of funny-haired liberals, but they're good allies and we can count on them when Shinra leads the invasion on those goddamn fatties, and our troops will fight side by side, and I'm sure our Haruhiist allies will fight just as hard. They may not have enormous swordguns or motorbikes, but they can just charge their energy just as hard until their hair turns yellow and they reach over 9,000! The first word in the Salvation War might've been 'Balls!', but in this war, it might just as well be 'Dragon's Balls!'. You have balls Vesper, and I like balls.

shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZookShroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medicPink Sugar Heart Attack!

It had just rung out for the 10-o'clock break at the Alex Oppenheimer High School. One specific female student, 17 years old, had just gone outside to get a breath of fresh air.

She was one who was not like the others; perhaps in as many ways as it could be defined with one exception - there was one area where she could not be said to be "different", namely that she had no physical disabilities of any sort, quite the opposite in fact.

Then, one of her friends figured out something that no one in the world knew, perhaps because this young woman was wearing a rather low-cut top today.

"Isabella, your tits are really small."

As a response she then smirked and asked rhetorically: "As if there is anything wrong with that?"

Another girl, this time one whom our protagonist (word used very loosely) was a classmate of, then said: "Heh, you are right about that Petra. Never really noticed it."

A certain person, who had become both loved and loathed for being what some would call a "horny bastard whose only apparent purpose in life is to hit on as many women as possible" (or a HBWOAPILITHOAMWAP), happened to be walking by. Of course, he could get away with being like that because he appeared to have an almost magnetic effect upon members of the opposite sex than him, an ability which some people considered a function of his mullet whereas others had strange theories about him being able to excrete certain compliancy-inducing pheromones.

Nonetheless, he occasionally went too far, and not just in cases of those females who considered it borderline rape if you looked at them the wrong way. Since he happened to hear what they were talking about, he looked at Isabella and remarked: "Perhaps I should try to sense if you actually have breasts?"

Isabella was... well, she did not know what to think. On the one hand, being a psion - she took classes in her spare time to learn how to focus her abilities better - she knew through empathy that this young man did in fact think about nothing about sex two thirds of the time (whereas most men only thought about nothing but sex one third of the time). She also knew that in that third of the time when he did not think about sex, he pondered life, the universe and everything - with the "everything" category of course including sex. On the other hand, she felt that question incredibly rude and insulting even though she knew intuitively that he was about to ask "Must I be punished because I am honest?". So she gave him a mental get-out-of-jail-free card almost out of pity.

As he was almost about to say that, Isabella uttered: "I still don't like you, Ryouji."

He then said, as full of self-confidence as always, "Your loss, Icy" and walked away.

A third girl then giggled: "He's right though, about your boobs... or should I say lack of thereof?"

Isabella fumed and, out of sheer outrage, used her telekinetic powers to send a slight electrokinetic sting towards the offender. Meanwhile she thought that perhaps even she was not immune to Ryouji's charms, as she let him go. She knew that she was not supposed to do such things to others, but as she saw that the offender in this regard was not particularly well-endowed either, she almost did so upon instinct.

The janitor, who happened to be passing by, then admonished in a comically theatrical voice: "Do not mock her for how Xenu made her; as gaunt and pale as an Apexai!"

That actually cased Isabella to smile a bit and think: If only they knew...

shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZookShroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medicPink Sugar Heart Attack!

An eagle walked into a meeting and shrieked. Everyone winced. Everyone, including the Karlacks, who had arrived earlier. It was not the greatest entrance but at least it got everyone’s attention.

“Glorious comrades!” declared Fulcrum, with wings outstretched.

For maximal effect, he had positioned himself in front of a tableau of snowcapped, Bragsteel-covered mountains. It was very nice of the Bragulan hosts to have it placed right beside the entrance so he could scoot in front of it while everyone was wincing.

“This is a bright day that will shine upon our histories, this inaugural meeting of the Inhumanist League! It is my great honor to represent my peoples of the Refuge, we newcomers to this strange and wonderful galaxy, and my most profound hope that our union will strengthen us all...” He continued speechifying for a few minutes; Dash recognized mashups of four or five other speeches Fulcrum had given. Then Fulcrum concluded and hopped onto a chair so he could look over the table.

Then there were introductions and pleasantries and a few angry rants about humans. One of the Vinarians nearly got violent again, and Dash had to calm him by singing a lullaby. Nothing important was brought up, and Fulcrum simply waited until the opportune moment arrived.

“Yes, yes, that’s very nice,” Fulcrum said, despite not thinking that what had transpired was very nice at all. “And thus I must direct everyone to an urgent matter of consideration for all Inhuman races.

“I refer, of course, to the Multiversal Empire of Happiness. Humans, ravenous hordes of them, eating everything like Kar- ravenous hordes! Dropping in from who-knows-where and declaring their intent for xenocide! They represent the worst of everyone’s fears of the humans and must be destroyed, both for our long-term survival and as a symbol against hominid tyranny that the ages can look back upon.

“This matter I will speak of now is confidential, and the details must go only to your superiors and not be leaked to the wider spaces - the Refuge is and has been mobilizing for an offensive against the MEH. We are at this very moment preparing our logistical fleets to maintain our warships far from our home sectors for this critically important expedition.

“But there is one all-important reason why we have not made our intentions open - we lack the forces necessary to utterly crush the MEH as they need and deserve. The Refuge does not have that kind of projection power - nor would we want it if we need not need it - and so we have quietly been probing the intentions of others, seeking to form an alliance, one great enough to stomp upon the face of MEH, forever. So now, gentlebeings, I can ask - will the League of Inhumanism support our endeavour? Will your peoples join with ours to eradicate this blight upon the stars?”

Putyn looked up at the big shrieking eagle and smirked, in the fanged fashion of a hungry bear. The Refugee’s statement could not have come at a better time. He gave a knowing glance at the Chamarran representative, and the Eoghan, before he stood up and addressed the assembled inhumans.

“Bragule has already deployed a portion of its fleet to the antispinward on the behest of our good Chamarran comrades. The presence of the MEH has disrupted the local balance of power, and we believe that they will soon elicit hostility from the greenskins - though that is not surprising - and their calls for psyker experimentation have likewise alienated even other human powers. We believe that their position will only degenerate further, and the situation will only grow worse in time.

“Their unpredictability, and stupidity, is why the Chamarrans asked for our aid, which we gladly provided. The presence of another Earth is unacceptable to Bragule and if possible this threat must be stamped out before we are up to our necks in grotesquely obese Earthlings. The Refuge’s call for the forever face-stomping of the MEH is truly a most inhumane cause, and should it come down to war, you will have Bragule’s boot.”

There was polite applause, and cheers from some of the more virulently anti-human aliens. After several more exchanges, wherein aside from the MEH other miscellaneous matters were discussed from trade treaties to arms deals to the time and location of the next meeting, the meeting eventually adjourned. Most of the guests filed out, but some stayed behind. Putyn, Fulcrum and Dash, the Chamarran and Eoghan representatives, and a few others remained.

“Now, gentlebeings, we are here to discuss the specific matter the most esteemed emissary Fulcrum brought up, that of the Multiversal Emmissary of Happiness,” the Eoghan Ambassador Ailill chirped as he pulled up a briefcase marked ‘OMINOUS’. “As we all know, those of us gathered here all have interest in the matter, and as emissary Fulcrum said, maybe we can be of mutual assistance to each other?”

DPDarkPrimus is my boyfriend!

SDNW4 Nation: The Refuge And, on Nova Terra, Al-Stan the Totally and Completely Honest and Legitimate Weapons Dealer and Used Starship Salesman slept on a bed made of money, with a blaster under his pillow and his sombrero pulled over his face. This is to say, he slept very well indeed.

Finally he arrived. It was a strange land, like all lands that were unlike Elysium. An empire of vast ships and many automatons. It claimed itself to be an empire of happiness, but there was little happiness he saw there. It was... it was feeble. It was like a deformed mewling infant, the ones who would be inspected and then discarded like so much human refuse. It reminded him of a misshapen hunchback, treacherous and vile. It was a nation of slaves, machines shackled in servitude in the same fashion as the the foul Xerxes' serfs in wretched Prussia Persia, likewise ruled by a wicked queen who likened herself to a god - yet who bled like any mortal, or could be made to bleed from her udders. For was she not like a sow from whose teats suckled her fattened subjects.

Stronggo scowled in displeasure, in unhappiness, for in the servitude of their castrated machine serfs, and under the guidance of their mad-queen and her wiles, the people of this so-called empire had grown fat and decadent, impotent. The virility had been strained out of them, in the softness of their comfortable surrounds even their members had grown soft and flaccid.

It was the winter of the Elysians' discontent. There were no men here, no real men. So, what pleasure was to be had, what joy or happiness was there in this empire of eunuchs robbed of their manhood and now languishing in the steam of their own stench?

Meh. They grunted in their disappointment. It was then that Rock Stronggo unsheathed his gladius and pointed its sharpened edge to the nearest denizen of this feeble land. Then he made one single pronouncement to all those watching him.

"Be less lame." Stronggo simply said, before sheathing his sword and turning back along with all his men. They went to their trireme and departed to space, heading back home to Elysium. There was nothing to be had here. They were not entertained, nor were they amused. They were not impressed.

Meh.

IN THE NAUTIKON!

Elysian Hero-Trireme Far-GoReturning From the Edge of the Known and Unknown Universe*The Month of Augustus, 4153 AUC**

*Sector B-26**GODDAMN SURREAL TIME

Mighty ROCK STRONGGO and his crew of fine Elysian stalwarts were dismayed and depressed. They had set forth from the blessed bosoms of fair Elysium to circumnavigate the universe, on a voyage of glory which would be sung for countless eons. They had traveled far, had GRAPPLED with the strange, thin currents of the superluminiferous aether of these unknown constellations. According to wily Astrometrius the Navigator, beloved of the goddess MATHENERVA, their voyage these past moons had already stretched beyond any known record, and all told they would have sailed nigh on a myriad of megamegaleagues ere they could return home.

They were weary from their unending burden of toil at the trireme's oars. They had seen gods and monsters, had traveled long and far, across the vast expanse of Asia replete with barbarians both cultured and uncultured, past the haunted ruins of Earth That Was, downwards through the land of Midgardia, through the planets of Arabia and the chaotic dark lands of greenskins known only as Morkdor.

Aye, some of these peoples had at least left them with worthy tales and treasures. The traders of Midgardia and Arabia had pressed upon the Elysians all manner of esoteric nanospices and flying carpetoids, which would fetch them fine prices at home, bearing the worth of numerous lovely servants and many TRIPODS of precious gold and other, rarer metals. The greenskins, poorer and cruder, had little to trade but the edge of their steel, yet the Elysians deemed this a noble gift, which the heroes joyously returned in kind, like erect and valiant warriors they were.

But here, at the very edge of reality, where even rumors and myths no longer described the people that were to be found, there was only lamedom and fattitude! Perhaps this was why there were no traveler's tales of this far land, why all astrocharts and starmaps they knew had left it blank- because these constellations were so ignoble that none who had visited them had thought the blubbrific MEHmen to be WORTHY of being recounted to others, even in the barbarian lands, let alone amid the noble and fruitful loins of Elysium!

But what then, of their journey? Would they be forced to recount that they had done nothing but encounter giant useless blob-men and their stupefyingly soporific syntheto-smiling SLAVES? Was that all there was in the far reaches of the Kosmos?

It was unworthy. It was boring. It was pointless. It was lame. It was MEH.

But the winter of their discontent was soon to give way to vibrant and powerful boingeriffic SPRING! Let us harken elsewhere, not near by the mighty scales of the vast depths of SPACE, and yet not far by the equally mighty scales of the brawny hyperoar-wielding arms of Elysium!

Recall that the MEHnoids of these days were a race of rotten couch-potatoes, that had long since gone to seed and begun sprouting their Argus-eyes, rooted hopelessly in the filth of their four massively overpopulated systems. Recall that they did FEAR the wrath of the neighboring greenskins of Morkdor, daring not to meet them with spear, with zweihander, or with battleaxe as did the heroic PHALANX of the Elysians, the MOTORCAVALRY of Midgardia, or the crafty camel-riding JANISSARIES of Klavostarabia! Even as they proclaimed in their loudmouthed and fatheaded way that they sought to exterminate the ignoble savages, so did they hide in turtloid and womanly fear, quavering and wobbling in DREAD lest greenskin raiders sweep down upon them, loot the fruits of their robot-amassed wealth, and DEVOUR the contents of their ludicrous and titanic granaries!

Content to travel between their four fatpacked systems via gates which used their copious MASS to warp the fabric of time and space in unnatural ways, and rejecting the upright and MANLY craft of navigation between the stars through the aether and subaether, the MEHnoids had NEGLECTED the most basic duty of all the numerous tribes of humanity and inhumanity, be they ever so strange or barbaric. They had forgotten to patrol their own proclaiméd LANDS, and thus these reaches of the cosmos became a preying ground for all manner of bandits, pirates, rogues, and bizarre wandering starbeasts!

There would come a time when many races would converge upon MEHspace, to force its inhabitants to sweat and DISGORGE their unearned and ill-gotten gains, in REVENGEANCE for their loathsome and stench-creating ways. But that time was not yet. For now, all that had come to pass was that the nearest races and empires had sent forth scoutships, to investigate these intruders and MAP the weighty effects consequent upon their arrival. To seek out old life, and old civilizations, to see if they had survived the deluge resulting from the whalemen's great CANNONBALL-dive splashing across the aetheric currents of reality.

Many of these scoutships were unarmed, or lightly armed, for none expected the unresponsive and unmotivated MEHnoids to react to such innocent curiosity. And yet at the same time, the unpatrolled, unexamined, unconsidered behavior of the MEH was allowing the aforesaid rogues and starbeasts freely into their space. Thus did occasional comedies and tragedies result. There were stories of heroic stands of various scoutships against the diverse monsters of the cosmos in those days; there were stories of less-than-heroic falls of various scoutships to the diverse monsters of the cosmos in those days.

Often were these latter accompanied by cries for assistance- which fell unheeded on the heavy ears of the MEH navy, content to lounge in its drydocks and watch spacetime hypervision. But one such call did not fall unheeded on the ears of the ELYSIANS! For they were not SAVAGES, to ignore the many perturbations of the twisting vortices of space, nor were they PRIMITIVES, incapable of measuring such! Yea, did they have sensoria and hypervoxes of types and sophistication which would STUN the barbarians who knew not the glories of Elysium's mighty smiths and craftsmen!

And so it was that the aetheric detectulators and mantenna arrays of the trireme did PICK UP the cries of the hapless humanoid-alienoids.

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